The Peak in Darien: An Octave of Essays

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^arbarb Sanfbergitg

Hitirars of tije ©ibinitg Sdjool

GIFT OF

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A VERITABLE HAND-BOOK OF NOBLE LIVING.

THE DUTIES OF WOMEN. By Frances Power
CoBBE. Author's American Edition. Seventh thou-
sand. Cloth. i2mo. $i.oo. Cheap edition, paper
covers, 2$ cents.

For sale by booksellers everywhere, and mailed,
postpaid, on receipt of price, by

GEORGE H. ELLIS, Publisher.
141 Franklin Street, Boston.

©

THE PEAK IN DARIEN,

WITH SOME OTHER INQUIRIES TOUCHING CONCERNS OF THE
SOUL AND THE BODY.

AN OCTAVE OF ESSAYS

BY

FRANCES POWER COBBE.

''Das Leben ist der Giiter hochstes nicht;
Der Uebel grosstes aber ist die Schuld.**

Di€ Braut von Messina.

BOSTON:
GEO. H. ELLIS, 141 FRANKLIN STREET.

LONDON: WILLIAMS & NORGATK
1882.

Ac
2

PREFACE.

Mr last little book, Lectures on the Duties of
Women^ was addressed principally to the young
of my own sex. The present volume is intended
for my contemporaries who are daily brought face
to face with some of the darker problems of the
time, or are led by their advancing years to ponder
ever more earnestly on the mystery of the great
transition. In these various papers, — some new,
some already published in different periodicals, — I
have striven to meet fairly the questions whether
the denial of God and immortality be indeed (as
Agnostics and Comtists are wont to boast) a " mag-
nanimous " creed, whether life be truly (as Leopardi
and Schopenhauer and hundreds of their English
disciples din daily in our ears) a burden and a curse,
and whether (as much recent legislation and news-
paper literature would seem to teach) bodily health
be after all the summum honum for which personal
freedom, courage, humanity, and purity ought all to
be sacrificed?

6 PBEFAOE.

To these discussions, I have added one on the
"Fitness of Women for the Ministry of Religion," —
a subject, I believe, destined soon to acquire impor-
tance, — with two or three less serious papers on
other matters touching moral questions; and, in
conclusion, I have returned to a speculation con-
cerning the immediate entry into the life after death
which I find has possessed interest for many readers.
That " Peak in Darien," which we must all ascend
in our turn, — the apex of two worlds, whence the
soul may possibly descry the horizonless Pacific
of eternity, — is the turning-point of human hope.
And it appears to me infinitely strange that so little
attention has been paid to the cases wherein indica-
tions seem to have been given of the perception by
the djdng of blessed presences revealed to them even
as the veil of flesh has dropped away. Were I per-
mitted to record with names and references half the
instances of this occurrence which have been nar-
rated to me, this short essay might have been swelled
to a volume. It is my wish, however, that it should
serve to suggest observation and provoke the inter-
change of experiences, rather than be considered
as pretending to decide affirmatively the question
wherewith it deals.

Perhaps it may be as well to forestall any mis-
apprehension by stating plainly that I utterly

PBEFAOS. 7

disbelieve, and eyen regard with intense dislike,

all so-called ^^Spiritualist" manifestations and

attempts to recall the dead; and that I have

never found any sufficient testimony for stories of

ghosts or apparitions of the departed beheld by men

and women still in the midst of life. Only at the

very moment when we are passing into their arms

does it seem to me that the law of our being may

permit us to recognize once more the beloved ones

who are " not lost, but gone before." The lines of

W. J. Fox precisely express my thought on this

subject : —

Gall them from the dead !

Yaln the call must be ;

But the hand of death shaU lay.

Like that of Christ, its healing day

On eyes which then shall see

That glorious company.

FRANCES POWER COBBB.

Jui«T, 1882.

^

1

7!

(/

Ifi-"^

MAaNANDIOUS ATHEISM.

" Be of good cheer, brother I " said John Bradford
to his fellow-martyr while the fagots were kindling :
" we shall have a brave supper in heaven with the
Lord to-night I " " Be of good cheer, everybody I "
cry an army of modern confessors, seated in library
chairs : " there is no heaven and no Lord, and when
we die there will be an end of us all, in saecvla
saeculorum; but the generations who come after us
will be greatly edified by our beautiful books and
our instructive example."

Perhaps the moral vitality of our age is in no
way better exemplified than by the fact that certain
doubts, which seem to strike mortal blows at the
head and heart of human virtue, yet leave it
breathing, and even pulsating with aspirations after
some yet loftier excellence than saints and heroes
have hitherto attained. To look back to the " infi-
dels " with whom Massillon and Jeremy Taylor had
to do, and compare them with the Agnostics of our

12 MAONANIMOTJS ATHEISM.

time, is indeed more encouraging than to compare
the "faithful" of past centuries with those of the
present age. While the old Atheist sheltered his
vice behind a rampart of unbelief where no appeals
could reach him, the new Agnostic honestly main-
tains that his opinions are the very best founda-
tions of virtue. No one can for a moment say of
him that he chooses darkness rather than light
hecaune his deeds are evil. If it be (as we think)
darkness which he has chosen, there can be no
question that his deeds are good, and that his con-
ceptions of duty are truly elevated and far-reaching,
and enforced by every argument which he has left
himself at liberty to use. Renouncing faith in God
and in the life hereafter, — that is to say, in Q-ood-
ness Infinite and Q-oodness Immortalized^ — he retains
the most fervent faith in goodness as developed in
human life, — that is to say, in goodness finite in
degree and in duration. If we are to accept his
own statement of the case, the Agnostic has com-
pletely turned the front of the theological battle.
It is now the pagans who have seized and hold
aloft the sacred labarum of duty and self-sacrifice,
and in hoc signo are destined to victory.

The claim is one of the gravest which can be put
forth between man and man. It was not easy — it
was, alas! often beyond our strength — to combat

MAGNANIMOXnS ATHBI8M. 18

our doubts or those of others, while yet we fought
agamst them as a sailor fights against enemies cut-
ting his anchor cable on a stormy night. We stand
amazed and disarmed by the strange intelligence
that, when these doubts have done their work, and
cast us adrift altogether from allegiance to God and
hope of another life, then^ when all seems lost, we
shall suddenly discover that we have touched the
Fortunate Isles of virtue and peace. Only the
thorough sceptic, we are assured, can be the perfect
saint. Nobody can disinterestedly serve his brother
on earth till he is entirely persuaded he has no
Father in heaven. The fruit of the Tree of Knowl-
edge (of course it is always assumed that it is a tree
of genuine knowledge on which Atheism grows) is
to be desired, not only because it will make us
"wise," but because it will make us good. Who
will hesitate any more to pluck and eat?

To the consideration of this now common pre-
tension of Agnosticism to be the true Friend of
VIBTTJ3B, in the room of the old delusion of religion,
the following pages will be devoted. For the pur-
poses of our particular argument and to avoid
entangling ourselves with too many collateral ques-
tions, I shall treat it here as the Assumption of the
Moral Superiority of Atheism over Theism. Is that
assumption justifiable? I, for one, am entirely

14 MAONANIMOTJS ATHEISM.

ready to admit that, if there be anything in the faith
in God and immortality which detracts from the
highest conceivable perfection of human virtue, — if,
in short, Atheism have a better moraUty to teach
than Theism, — then the case of Theism must be
abandoned. The religion which is not the holiest
conceivable by the man who holds it is condemned
i'p%o facto.

For the present, I may assume that no important
difference of opinion exists as to the practical rules
of morality. It is the proper motives to a virtuous
and self-sacrificing life which Agnostics claim to
place on higher ground than that which has been
hitherto given to them. They propose to tell us
to "do justice and love mercy" both m a better
and more disinterested way than while we added
to those unquestionable duties the mistaken at-
tempt to walk humbly with our God. The ques-
tion lies in a nutshell, — Can they do it? Is there
anything m the true Theistic faith detracting from
the disinterestedness of virtue, or calculated to rob
it of a single ray of purity and glory ? This must
be our first contention, since religion now stands
on its defence as a basis of morality. When it is
settled, it may perhaps appear that religion may
justly again assume the offensive, and challenge
Atheism to prove its capacity for serving equally

MAONANIMOtTS ATHBISM. 15

efficiently as a support for the virtue of humanity ;
and, if it appear that to such a challenge no sat-
isfactoiy reply can be given, then it will be man-
ifest that, in their expressions of satisfaction and
joy at the anticipated downfall of religion, Atheists
display disregard of the moral interests of their race.
Let the lists be cleared in the first place. I
shall not be expected to defend all the base and
demoralizing things which, in the ^misused name
of Christianity, have been inculcated concerning
"Other-worldliness,"^-the doing good for the sake
of getting to heaven, and avoiding evil from fear of
hell. Since the day, recorded by Joinville, when
the mysterious old woman carried her waterpot and
torch before St. Louis, and told him she intended
to put out the fires of hell and bum up heaven, so
that men might learn to love God for his own sake,
and not from fear or hope, — since that distant time,
there have not been wanting righteous souls who
have gimed and spumed at the vile lessons current
in the Churches, and asked with Eingsley, —

" Jb selfislmess^— for ihne, a Bin,— stretched out into eternity,
Celestial prodenoe ?"

Beyond a doubt, one of the heaviest charges agamst
the popular creed is that, while its ministers have
raged against the smallest theological error, and

16 MAGNAIOMOUS ATHEISM.

convulsed the world by their ridiculous disputes
concerning mysteries altogether beyond the reach
of human comprehension, they have complacently
endured and even fostered moral heresies which
withered up the very roots of virtue. The whole
tone of ordinary Romish exhortation, /aire son scdut^
is often base beyond expression; and the teaching
of the Church of England in the last century was
no better. Here are some specimens of it. Ruther-
ford says (^Nature and Obligations of Virtue^ 1744),
" Every man's happiness is the ultimate end which
reason teaches him to pursue, and the constant and
uniform practice of virtue becomes our duty when
revelation has informed us that God will make us
finally happy in a life after this." Paley is no
better. He says : * " Virtue is the doing good to
mankind in obedience to the wiU of God and /or
the sake of everlasting happiness. According to
which definition, the good of mankind is the subject,
the will of God the rule, and everlasting happiness
the motive of virtueJ*^ Waterland, the great cham-
pion of Trinitarianism, went even further. He says
that "being just and grateful without future pros-
pects has as much of moral virtue in it as folly or
indiscretion has.^^ These are the kind of doctrines
which have been placidly admitted among the recog-
nized teachings of the great Christian Churches*

•Moral PMlo$oph/y, B. L, oliap. tU.

MAGITANIMOUS ATHXIBM. 17

Nor have some of the philosophers proved a whit
more conscious of the simple notion of duty. Ben-
tham, for example,* plainly lays it down that for
a man to give up a larger pleasure of his own for
a smaller one of his neighbor's is an act not of
virtue, but of folly.

Certainly, if the new Agnostics had no types of
religion or morality save these thoroughly debased
ones wherewith to compare their system, they
might well claim to be the evangelists of a purer
gospel. Better, assuredly better, would it be to
believe in no God than to pay homage to the aU-
adorable Author of Good for the sake of the pay-
ment we expect him to give us. Better, assuredly
better, to expect no life beyond the grave than to
poison every act of courage, justice, or beneficence
by the vile notion of being rewarded for it in
heaven; or to refrain from treachery and cruelty
and lies, merely, like a beaten hound, from dread
of the bloody scourge of hell.

But it would be an insult to the well-informed
and widely-read advocates of Agnosticism, if we
were to assume for a moment that they were igno-
rant that this base alloy of religion has been almost
universally repudiated by the higher class of Eng-
lish divines of the present day, of every shade of
Orthodoxy; while, outside of the Churches, there

^JMonMogy, p. IffL

18 ICAGKAinMOirS ATHBXBBC.

is not a religious man who does not regard them
with unmitigated disgust. The question really is,
not whether religion may be made to corrupt
morality with bribes and threats, but whether it
properly does so; whether a religious man ought^
in accordance with his theology, to be less disin-
terested than an Atheist. To reply to this question,
it seems only necessary to recall what a Theist be-
lieves about God and immortality as concerned with
his own virtue.

A Theist believes, then, that the goodness and
justice, which the Agnostic recognizes and loves so
well in their human manifestations, have existence
beyond humanity, and are carried to ideal perfec-
tion in a Being who is, in some sense, the Soul and
Ruler of the universe.

Thi% belief, at all events (whether legitimately
held or only a dream), cannot, I presume, so far as
it goes, be charged with detracting from the purity
of virtue. Goodness cannot be esteemed less good,
or justice less just, because there exists One who is
supremely good and just.

Further, as regards himself, the Theist believes
that this supremely good and just Being so con-
stituted his nature and the world around him as
that the law of goodness and justice should be
known to him as the sacred rule, whereby he is

lliaKANIMOnS ATHBIBIC. 19

inwardly bound to determine his actions and sen-
timents. In other words, he believes that he has
acquired his moral sense of God, and not from any
undesigned, fortuitous order of things which may
have impressed it as an hereditary idea on his brain.
I am at a loss to guess how this step further can
be supposed to be hostile to the disinterestedness
of virtue. It is easy to see how the opposite theory
of the oa%i& of conscience, as exhibited in Mr.
Darwin*8 Descent of Man, — whereby the authority
of the human intuition, " Thou shalt do no murder,"
is traced to the same origin as the bees' intuition
of the duty of killing their brothers, the drones
(namely, the hereditary transmission of ideas found
conducive to the weKare of the tribe), — should
dethrone Conscience from her assumed supremacy,
and place her among the crowd of other hereditary
notions, neither more nor less deserving of honor.
And, on the other h^id, the attribution of our
moral ideas, directly or indirectly, to the teaching of
a Being immeasurably above us, — a theory which
represents conscience as a ray shot downward from
a sun, instead of a marsh-fire illumined under special
conditions of social existence, and liable to blaze
up, die down, or flit hither and thither as they may
determine, — must inevitably elevate and sanctify
the laws of morals to our apprehension. In truth.

20 MAONAIJnMOUS ATHXISM.

it is obvious that, had the first hypothesis (of the
hereditaiy transmission of useful ideas) been heard
of in the days of our ancestors, the " mystic exten-
sion " (as Mr. Mill calls it) of utility into morality
could never have been accomplished, and repentance
and remorse would have been unknown experiences.
But aU this refers to the practical avthority of moral
laws. It is with the disinterestedness of the man
who obeys them that we are at present concerned ;
and this disinterestedness is not, that I perceive,
influenced one way or the other by the theory he
may hold of how he comes by his knowledge of
them.

But now we reach the point where, it is to be
presumed, the Atheist finds ground for his claim to
superior disinterestedness. The Theist believes not
only that goodness and justice are attributes of God,
and that God has taught him to be good and just,
but that God further holds what the old Schoolmen
called the Justitia Mectoria of the universe, — that
he so ordains things as that, sooner or later, good
will surely befaU the good, and evil the evil. So
much as this is included in the simplest elements of
Theism. In its fuller development, Theism teaches
more : namely, that God takes the interest of a
Father in the moral welfare of his children ; that he
has created every hiunan soul (and doubtless thou-

MA0NANIMOITS ATHBI8H. 21

sands of races of other intelligent beings) for the
express purpose that each should attain, through the
teaching and trials of existence, to virtue, and so
enter into the supreme bliss of sympathy and com-
munion with himself. Theism thus understood
teaches that God is perpetually training each soul
for that sublime end, inspiring it with light, answer-
ing its prayers for spiritual aid, punishing it for its
errors, hedging up its way with thorns to prevent
its wanderings, and finally certainly conducting it,
through this life and perhaps many lives to come, to
the holiness and blessedness for which it was made.
The position of a Theist differs therefore essentially
from that of an Atheist as regards the practice of
virtue, inasmuch as the Atheist thinks he has no
superhuman spectator or sympathizer; that the
thoughts and feelings which awaken his conscience
and move his heart do not originate in any mind
out of his own ; that the woes of his life bear with
them no moral meaning of retribution or expiation ;
and finally that, whether he be a hero or a coward,
a saint or a sinner, it will be aU one, so far as himself
is concerned, when the hour of his death has
sounded. His actions may and will have important
consequences to other men, but as regards his own
destiny they can have no consequences at all; for
the grave will receive everything that remains oi

22 MAQNAKIMOTJS ATHEISM.

hini. The virtues lie may have acquired with un-
utterable struggles will die away into nothingness,
like the sound of a broken harp-string. He will
neither rejoin his dead friends nor come into any
fresh consciousness of God. Neither dead friends
nor God have any existence; and a little sooner or
later, as he may chance to be a more or less impor-
tant person, he will be altogether forgotten, and no
being in the universe will ever more remember that
he once was.

Now, I think it would be idle to deny that it must
be far harder to be virtuous under the shadow of
this Atheism than in the sunshine of Theism. The
tax and strain upon the moral nature of a man who
holds the views just indicated of the emptiness of
the universe of any One absolutely good and just,
of the low and haphazard origin of conscience, and
of the utter loneliness and unaided state wherewith
man pursues his weary course from the cradle to the
inevitable, eternal grave, must be simply enormous.
All honor, sincere and hearty honor, and full recog-
nition of their noble disinterestedness, be to those
Atheists who, under such strain, yet struggle suc-
cessfully and iQcessantly to do good and not evil all
their days, and to die bravely and calmly, letting go
their grasp of life and joy and love, knd sinking with-
out a groan under the waters which are to cover

UAQ^ASmiOVB ATHBISM. 28

them for evennore. There is something in the self-
sustained, Promethean courage of such a man which
commands our admiration; and we can well imagine
him looking round on his suffering fellows pitifully,
as on his orphaned and disinherited brothers and
sisters, with infinite compassion, deeming them des-
tined like himself to perish with all their aspirations
and capacities disappointed and unfulfilled. For
such a man to devote himself to the labors of prac-
tical benevolence and the relief of the woe which
surrounds him, whence he usually draws his strong-
est arguments for his desolate creed, would seem
to be the fittest, if not the only fit pursuit;
and, when we behold him engaged in it (as in
instances I could readily name), our whole hearts
recognize his virtue as absolutely beautiful and dis-
interested. But because the Atheist's virtue, when
he is virtuous, is without alloy, is there any just
reason to hold that it is more pure than that of the
Theist? His task is, as I have readily admitted, the
harder of the two; so hard indeed is it that there
seem the gravest reasons for fearing that, if a few
noble spirits perform it, the mass of tried and
tempted men who can scarcely lift themselves from
their selfishness even with the two wings of Faith
and Hope will lie prone in the very mire of vice
when those wings are broken. But, because the

24 MAGNANIMOTJS ATHEISM.

Atheist's duty is harder to do, is it consequentlj
better done? Is the music which he draws from
that one string of philanthropy sweeter than the
full chord of all the religious and social affections
together?

Let us revert to the points of difference between
the two creeds as above enumerated. Is a man
necessarily self-interested in doing the will of a
Being whom he loves and hopes by serving to
approach and resemble? Of course, if he is look-
ing for payment, — for health, wealth, happiness
on earth or celestial glory, — for any adventitious
reward outside of the fact of becoming better and
nearer to God, — then, indeed, his service is self-
interested. He is a mercenary in the army of
martyrs. In strict ethics, his conduct, however
exactly legal, is not virtuous; for virtue can only
be absolutely without side-looks to contingent profit,
present or future. I presume that, when Agnostics
boast of the superior disinterestedness of the virtue
they inculcate over that of religious men, they think
(and cannot divest themselves of the early acquired
habit of thinking) of religion as of this kind of
labor-and-wages system, — hard duty below, high
glory above, — with perhaps the additional compli-
cation of certain scholastic doctrines of imputed
righteousness. But it is time this confusion should

MAGKANIMOirS ATHEISM. 25

cease. Love of goodness impersonated in God is not
a less disinterested, though naturally a more fervent,
sentiment than love of goodness in the abstract.
The Theist, in his attempt to obey by good deeds
the will of the Being he loves, acts as simply as the
Atheist, who loves the good deed, thinking that no
being higher in the scale of existence than himself
has any appreciation of the difference between good
and evil. The Theist, indeed, adds to his love of
goodness per se a love of goodness impersonated in
God, who desires good actions to be done,* and
possibly also a hope that, by doing good now, he
may be given the power to do it again and again for
ever; but it is all the same charmed circle of doing
good for goodness^ sake^ out of which he never
emerges into any such motive as doing good for the
sake of honor, prosperity, or heavenly bliss in a
golden city. The sole thing which the Theist asks
of God as the reward of obedience is the power to
obey better in future, the privilege of obeying for-
ever. The payment of his virtue is to be virtuous

•Hiss Martineaa Bays: **I saw with the pain of disgust how much
lower a thing it is to lead even the loftiest life from a regard to the will or
mind of any other being than from a natural working out of our own
powers" CAutobioffraphy, Vol. IL). I must humbly confess I have not
come yet to see anything of the kind. Froyided that the Being to whose
wiU we haye regard is Supreme Ooodness itself, it seems to me infinitely
higher to striye to assimilate our will to His than to ** work out our own

26 MAGKANIMOUS ATHEISM.

now and throughout eternity. Whether it be in
this life or another, there is no difference ; no new
principle comes into play ; no bribe unsought for
here is hoped for there. He says to God : " It is a
joy to serve Thee, but infinitely greater is the joy to
serve Thee with the assurance that the term of my
service will never expire. Precious is the privilege
of calling Thee Father. How glad then am I that I
shall be a child at Thy feet forever ! Lord, I seek no
heaven hereafter. I covet no abode of bliss, no out-
ward reward above. To be with Thee is my heaven
and my salvation and the only reward I seek. As I
abide in Thee now, may I continue to live in Thee,
O Father; and to grow in wisdom and love and
purity and joy in Thee, time without end." *

Surely, it is altogether absurd to speak of this
religion as involving any, even the very slightest
shade of interestedness or detraction from the high-
est conceivable type of human virtue. If it deserve
such a condemnation, then must likewise stand
condemned the most pure and exalted human love
which friend has ever felt for friend, — for this also,
by its very nature, seeks to serve for love's sake,
to arrive at perfect harmony, to dwell with the
beloved in unbroken and everlasting union.

Turn we now to the other side of the subject.
Theism has been, I hope, vindicated from the

*AUme to the AUme, p. 110, third edition.

HAGNANIMOtrS ATHEISM. 27

charge of interestedness. What shall we say to
the general ethical aspect of Agnosticism, which
assumes to be the nobler system? Admitting the
blameless conduct and the high aspirations of some
of its professors, what value shall we attach to
their claim to be the heralds of a higher morality?

If I may, without offence, condense their lessons
in a very obvious parallel, they amount to this
"symbol": "Whosoever will be saved, before all
things it is necessary that he cease to believe either
in one God or in three ; and that he be fully assured
that those who have done good and those who have
done evil shall alike go into everlasting nothing-
ness." This creed piously accepted, he will advance
to perfection and outrun in two ways any excellence
which has been hitherto attained.

1st. While recognizing that, so far as he himself
is concerned, death means the annihilation of con-
sciousness, he will act throughout his life with a
deep and conscientious concern for the consequences
of his actions to those who come after him or, as
Mr. Frederick Harrison expresses it, to his own
posthumous activity.

2d. By welcoming the conclusions of Atheism,
and especially the doctrine of the annihilation of
consciousness at death, not as a sorrowful truth,
but as the latest and brightest gospel of good

28 MAONANIMOUS ATHEISM.

tidings; and proclaiming, on all suitable occasions,
that they afford a better stand-point and outlook
for humanity than any faith or hope which has been
hitherto entertained.

The first of these doctrines was set forth, a few
years ago, in two eloquent and affecting papers, by
Mr. Frederick Harrison, in the Nineteenth Century,
How much sympathy I feel with a great deal
which is said in these papers,* how sincerely I
respect Mr. Harrison's noble conception of the aim
of life, even where I most completely misdoubt the
validity of the method he proposes for attaining it,
there is scarcely need to say. It is precisely be-
cause such Positivists as he and Mr. Morley and
the late George Eliot, and such Agnostics as many
I could name, assume such really high ground in
their teaching, and appeal (though, as I think, in
a fallacious way) to our very noblest sympathies
and aspirations, that I feel urged to raise my feeble

*E.g.9 the following passage, which deserves to be reprinted a hun-
dred times, Nineteeviibh Century ^ July, 1877, p. 832 : *' We entirely agree
with the theologians that our age is beset with a grievous danger of
materialism. There is a school of teachers abroad, and they have found
an echo here, who dream that victorious vivisection will ultimately win
them anatomical solutions of man's moral and spiritual mysteries.
Such unholy nightmares, it is true, are not likely to beguile many minds
in a country like this, where social and moral problems are still in their
natural ascendant. But there is a subtler kind of materialism, of which
the dangers are real. It does not, indeed, put forth the bestial sophism
that the apex of philosophy is to be won by improved microeoopes and

MA0NANIMOXrS ATHEISM. 29

voice and call in question their guidance. There,
in truth, stand, as they point to them, the snowy
summits of purity and goodness. But by what
path would they guide us to ascend them? Even
if their own strong souls may climb those arid
crags, can they be in any possible sense a better
way than that by which millions of believers in God
and immortality have gone up on high?

Let us take Mr. Harrison's doctrine of the " Post-
humous Activities" of the soul, and endeavor to
estimate how far it is calculated to act as an efficient
motive of virtue on ordinarily constituted, well-in-
tentioned men and women. We must bear in mind
that it is formally proposed as a substitute for the
old belief in the immortality of the individual, —
that is (according to the Theist creed), in the im-
mortality of the virtiie of the individual. While a
Theist believes that, having lighted that sacred
torch, he shall be permitted to bear it onward,

new batteries. But then it has nothing to say about the spiritual life of
men. It flUs the air with p»ans to science, but it always means physical,
not moral science. It shirks the question of questions,— To what human
end is this knowledge ? How shall man thereby order his life as a whole ?
Where is he to And the object of the yearnings of his spirit ? "

I am not concerned to defend the orthodox ideal of heayen against
Mr. Harrison's strictures ; but I cannot help entering a protest against
his sneer at the " eternity of the tabor** as " so gross, so sensual a creed.**
It seems to me it errs by an excessive and unreal spirituality. It was,
certainly, not a ** gross " or ** sensual ** order of mind which deemed the
act of adoration to be one wherein man could spend an eternity of ecstasy.

80 MAGKANDCOnS ATHEISM.

burning more purely and brightly forever, the Com-
tist thinks he must lay down his at the side of his
grave, though other men may igiiite their own from
it, and so carry on its light from age to age.

In the first place, I must remark that, like the
promise on which such stress is laid in Dr. Bridge's
General View of Positivism^ that attached husbands
and wives may be solemnly interred side by side,
there is nothing new in these anticipations. We
have always known that we might be buried in the
same vault with our next friend, as we have always
known that our actions would continue to bear fruit
after our departure. We entertained the first hope
(so far as such a pitiful matter as the future position
of our deaf and blind decaying dust deserves to
be considered a hope), and we were aware of the
responsibility, — plus the belief that we ourselves
should enjoy free converse with the spirit of our
friend, and afford to smile together on our poor
mouldering garments laid up side by side in the
tomb, — and plus the belief that we might ourselves
be cognizant of our posthumous activities. There
is nothing in the fact that both the hope and the
sense of responsibility must now stand by them-
selves for what they are worth, to give them (so far
as I can see) any fresh leverage as motives of con-
duct. People who did not love each other better

MAGKAimf OTIS ATHEIBM. 81

while they expected to be at liberty to spend eter-
nity in conscious communion, as well as to be buried
in the same grave, certainly will not love each other
better when their future prospects are limited to the
family vault. And people who have not regulated
their conduct with a view to their post-mortem influ-
ence while they anticipated to be living somewhere
to know, or, at all events, to be obliged to think
about it, are very little likely to regulate it the
better when they are convinced that, if they leave
the deluge behind them, they will neither know nor
care one iota. As to the good man, he will, under
the old creed and under the new alike (and neither
more nor less, so far as I can perceive), entertain a
solemn sense of a responsibility to do all the good
and refrain from every evil in his power during his
threescore years and ten, — not first, or chiefly, for
the sake of consequences near or remote to himself
or other people in this world or another, but because
goodness, truth, courage, justice, and generosity are
good in themselves, lovable in his eyes and in the
eyes of God, and falsehood, impurity, cruelty, and
treachery are bad and despicable, hateful to him and
to his Maker. Afterward, and as a reinforcement
of his choice of Scipio, he will reflect that every
good act entails good consequences in widening
circles of loving-kindness, honor, and honesty, and

82 MAGNANIMOUS ATHEISM.

every bad one the reverse; and lie will hope in
dying to reflect that the sum of the influence he
leaves to work after him will be wholly on the side
of truth, justice, and love. It is monstrous for Mr.
Harrison to say that "the difference between our
(Positivist) faith and that of the orthodox is this.
We look to the permanence of the activities which
give others happiness. TJhey look to the permanence
of the consciousness which can enjoy happiness."
Why should looking to the permanence of conscious-
ness and happiness make a man care less for the
activities " which give others happiness " ? Does A
care less for B's welfare because he would like to be
alive to see it, or even alive at the antipodes at the
same time?

Moralists and divines of all ages have not over-
looked the remoter consequences of our actions in
rehearsing the motives in favor of virtue. But it is
idle to attach to it, as applied to the bulk of man-
kind, more practical force than it possesses. In the
first place, when such an observer of things as Shak-
spere could say that

** The evil which men do lives after them.
The good is oft interred with their bones,"

it is open to us all to doubt whether some of the
very noblest achievements of human virtue have left

MAGNANIMOTJS ATHEISM. 88

any other mark than on the virtuous souls them-
selves, which (as we Theists think) enjoy even now
in a higher existence their blessed inward conse-
quences. The martyrs who perished unseen and
unknown in the loathsome dungeons and amid the
protracted tortures of the Inquisition in Spain,
where the Reformation they would have established
was absolutely extinguished and left no ray of light
behind, — could these men cheer themselves under
the awful strain of their agonies by a motive of
such tenuity as the prospect of their "posthumous
activities " ?

But admitting, for argument's sake, that the
motive would serve always to support the heroic
order of virtues, would it likewise aid the still
more important ones of every-day conduct? His
own illustrations ought surely to have made Mr.
Harrison pause before he assumed it. He speaks of
Newton as "no longer destroying his great name by
feeble theology or querulous pettiness," of Shakspere
as "the boon companion and retired playwright of
Stratford," of Dante as the " querulous refugee from
Florence," and of Milton as "the blind and stern
old malignant of Bunhill Fields." Now these are
his chosen exemplars of the enormous " posthumous
activity" which a man may exert, and certainly
nobody now living can hope that he shall ever exer-

84 MAGNANIMOUS ATHEISM.

cise one-tenth as much. But their "pettiness" and
"querulousness" and "boon companionship" and
"sternness" in their lifetimes did not hinder, or
even essentially detract from, their stupendous
"posthumous activity." Why, then, should lesser
people have any scruple in being petty, querulous,
or stem, or indulging in pot-companionship, or any
other faults of temper or habit, on account of their
little posthumous activities, whatever they may hope
that these may prove ?

Obviously, Mr. Harrison has a misgiving as to the
force which his argument can be expected to exert
on ordinary mortals or for the daily purposes of life.
Though he says that the truth he teaches "is not
confined to the great," and adds the beautiful
remark that " in some infinitesimal degree the
humblest life that ever turned a sod sends a wave —
no, more than a wave, a life — through the ever-
growing harmony of human society," yet even
while he alleges that a concern for such posthumous
activity is "no doubt now in England the great
motive of virtue and energy," and asks, "Can we
conceive a more potent stimulus to daily and hourly
striving after a true life?"* he says in the next
page that " it would be an endless inquiry to trace
the means whereby this sense of posthumous partici-
pation in the life of our fellows can be extended to

•PagM 838, 880.

MAONANIMOUS ATHEISM. 85

the mcus^ as it certainly affects already the thought-
ful and refined." Honestly, he admits that it is
" impossible it should become universal and capable
of overcoming selfishness" "without an education,
a new social opinion without a religion; I mean
an organized religion, not a vague metaphysic."
" Make it," he cries, with almost the enthusiasm of
a discoverer, "at once the basis of philosophy, the
standard of right and wrong, and the centre of a
religion," and then it may perhaps be achieved.

But, in sober truth, what "education" or "organ-
ized religion " (i.e., of course, Comtism) can possibly
transform this remote anticipation of the results of
our actions after we are dead into a practical lever
for daily duty for the great bulk of mankind? It is
the specialty of all vice to be selfishly indifferent to
the injurious consequences of our actions, even to
their immediate and visible consequences, to those
nearest to us. Is it not almost ludicrous to think of
exhorting the drunkard who sees "his wife and chil-
dren starving round him to-day, or the ill-conducted
girl who is breaking her mother's heart, or the hard
task-master or landlord who is grinding the faces of
the poor to fill his pocket, to refrain from their
misdoings on account of the evil which they will
cause fifty years hence to people unborn? Or let
us try to apply the principle to that sound mass

86 MAGKAKIMOITS ATHEISM.

of every-day English virtue which ia, after all, the
very air we breathe, — the daily dutifulness, the
purity, the truthfulness, the loving-kindness of our
homes, the beautiful patience to be witnessed beside
a thousand sick-beds. Were we to ask the simple-
hearted men and meek women who exemplify these
virtues whether they ever think of the excellent
"posthumous activities" which they will exert on
their surviving acquaintances, would they not be
utterly bewildered? The clergyman (or let us
have the Comtist philosopher) who will go through
a workhouse ward, or round the cottages of a
village, and offer such a suggestion as a topic of
encouragement, would, I think, effect a very small
measure of reformation. Nor do I think it is neces-
sarily a low type of mind which does not project
itself much into the future, whether in this world
or the next; but which is vividly affected by the
idea of a present righteous law claiming immediate
obedieiice, and a present adorable God watching
whether that obedience be paid, but which takes in
even the idea of immortality more as adding an
infinite dignity to moral things and human souls
than as a direct motive to moral action. To such
a person, the promise of "posthumous activities"
is as remote and inoperative a principle as it is
possible to propose; and he can scarcely help smil-

MAGKAinMOTJS ATHEISM. 87

ing at it, as he does at the observation of Pliny,
that the "happiest of all possible anticipations is
the certain expectation of an honorable and un-
dying renown." Posthumous activity affords a far
nobler motive than posthumous fame; but they
both appeal to sentiments which have little weight
with the majority of minds, and no weight at all
with a great number not undeserving of respect.

The truth seems to be that the leading Comtists
and Agnostics of the day not only belong to an
exceptional type of human nature, little touched
by grosser impulses and highly sensitive to the
most rarefied order of influences, but are unable
to descend from such altitude, and realize what
ordinary flesh-and-blood men and women are made
of. As Mr. Darwin unconsciously betrayed that
he had never once had occasion to repent an act
of unkindness, when he theorized about repentance
as beginning by a spontaneous reversion to sym-
pathy and good-will to the people we have injured
(in bold contradiction to Tacitus' too true maxim,
"JJumam generis proprium est^odisse quern laeseris "),
so the disciples of Comte unwittingly allow us to
perceive that they really consider an exalted and
fiax-reaching interest in the welfare of our kind as
the sort of motive which is aljeady "now in Eng-
land the great motive of virtue and energy."

88 MAONANIMOUS ATHEISM.

Let me explain myself. I do not think there is
any precept too high to be accepted by the mass
of mankind: nay, I think that the higher, nobler,
more self-sacrificing the lesson, the warmer response
it wiU draw forth from the heart of humanity. But
this is the moral excellence of the precept, the lofti-
ness of the purity, the nobleness of the generosity,
the courageousness of the self-devotion, which are
demanded. It is quite another thing to choose to
present, as the proper motive of daily virtue, an
idea requiring a trained intellect to take it in and
a vivid imagination to realize it. Every argument
for virtue, for sobriety, veracity, and so on, drawn
from considerations of future consequences, labors
under this irremediable defect : that it appeals least
to those whom it is most necessary to influence.
When we go further, and place our fulcrum of
moral leverage in the period after the death of the
man to whom we appeal, and candidly tell him that
he will neither enjoy the sight of any good he may
have effected, nor suffer from the spectacle of the
results of his wrong-doing, we have reached (as it
seems to me) the ne plus ultra of impracticability.
Woe to human virtue when its advocates are
driven to attach primary importance to such an
argument, and dream it can be made "the centre
of a religion " 1

MAGNANIMOITS ATHEISM. 89

To sum up this subject. To a man of high calibre
and gifts, the consideration of " posthumous activi-
ties " may act as a spur to doing great actions, but
scarcely as a motive to regulate his daily life and
temper. He will, perhaps, under its influcDce re-
form the prisons of Europe, and at the same time
break his wife's heart ; write a great epic poem,
and treat his daughters like slaves; paint splendid
pictures, and remain a selfish and sordid miser;
fight heroically his country's battles, and lead a life
of persistent adultery; be at once a disinterested
statesman in a corrupt age, and an habitual drunkard.

As to the mass of mankind, who are endowed
neither with any superior gifts to employ, nor vivid
imagination to realize the results of their actions
hereafter, an appeal to them to act virtuously in
consideration of their posthumous activities would
draw forth some such reply as this : " Our conduct
can, at most, leave aft^r our deaths only very small
results on a very few people whom we shall never
know. We find it hard enough to make sacrifices
for those whom we do know and love, and whose
happiness or misery we actually witness. It is
asking too much of us that, for remote, contingent,
and evanescent benefits to our survivors, we should
undergo any pain or labor, or renounce any of the
pleasures which in our poor short lives (so soon

40 HAGNANIMOUS ATHEIBM.

to end forever in darkness) may fall within our
grasp."

Thus, in its capacity of the Friend of Virtue^ it
seems that Atheism begins by depriving virtue of
some of the strongest, if not the very strongest,
motives by which it has hitherto been supported,
and offers in their room, as the best substitute for
them and the future " centre of religion," a consid-
eration of Posthumous Activities, whose force is of
necessity both partial as to the virtues it iQCulcates,
and extremely limited as to the persons over whom
it can exercise any influence. And that force, such
as it is, appears to be iq no way specially connected
with the Atheistic view of human destiny, but
belongs to every moral system in the world.

Finally, as if to complete the nullity of the motive
of Posthumous Activities, there comes a reflection
which must take erelong a prominent place in
disquisitions of this kind. Comtists talk of the
" immortality," the " eternity," of a dead man's
influence. But, if each individual human soul is
destined to be extinguished at death, then there
is nothing wherewith man is concerned which is
immortal or eternal. Our race is destined irretriev-
ably to perish cls a race^ if it perish piecemeal with
every soul which drops into the grave. Miss Mar-

MAGNANIMOUS ATHEISM. 41

tineau's wild talk about '' the special destination of
my race" being "infinitely nobler than the highest
proposed under a scheme of divine moral govern-
ment " * (an assertion in itself simply absurd, since
the believers in a scheme of divine government
hold that whatever is noblest is by the hypothesis
assuredly our destination), is rendered doubly pre-
posterous when we bear in mind what science teaches
regarding the inevitable lapse of this planet within a
limited epoch into a condition of uninhabitability.
The following observations are made on this subject
in a little jeu d^ esprit which I may be pardoned for
quoting. It assumes to be an extract from a news-
paper of the next century, and the men of that
period are supposed to look back upon the doc-
trine of "Posthumous Activities" with very little
respect : —

It is needless to repeat that the delusive exhortations of some
amiable but short-sighted philosophers of the last century to
"labor for the good of Humanity in future generations" (a
motive which they supposed would prove a substitute for the old
historic religions) have been once and for all answered by the
grand discovery of astronomers that our planet cannot long re-
main Che habitation of man (even if it escape any sidereal explo-
sion), since the solar heat is undergoing such rapid exhaustion.
When the day comes, as come it must, when the fruits of the
earth perish one by one, when the dead and silent woods petrify,
and all the races of animals become extinct, when the icy seas

•AuMiiograipIvy, VoL IL, p. <Be.

42 MAGNANIMOUS ATHEISM.

flow no longer, and the pallid sun shines dimly over the frozen
world, locked, like the moon, in eternal frost and lifelessness, —
what in that day, predicted so surely by science, will avail all the
works and hopes and martyrdoms of man? All the stores of
knowledge which we shall have accumulated will be forever lost.
Our discoveries, whereby we have become the lords of creation
and wielded the great forces of Nature, will be useless and for-
gotten. The virtues which have been perfected, the genius which
has glorified, the love which has blessed the human race, will all
perish along with it. Our libraries of books, our galleries of
pictures, our fleets, our railroads, our vast and busy cities, will be
desolate and useless forevermore. No intelligent eye will ever
behold them, and no eye in the universe will know or remember
that there ever existed such a being as man. This is what
Science teaches us unerringly to expect, and in view of it who
shall talk to us of ** laboring for the sake of Humanity " ? The
enthusiasm which could work disinterestedly for a Progress des-
tined inevitably to end in an eternal Glacial Period must be
recognized as a dream, wherein no man in a scientific age can
long indulge.*

The second counsel of perfection of the Agnostic
teachers is, as above said, " to welcome the conclu-
sions of Atheism, and especially the doctrine of
annihilation of consciousness at death, not merely as
truth, but as the latest gospel of good tidings."

This lesson, though repeated more or less by
nearly all Agnostic and Comtist writers, has been
perhaps most prominently brought to the front in
the Life of Harriet Martineau. I shall take her
observations and example as the text for the remarks

•Affe of Seianee, p. 4a.

MAONAmMOUS ATHEISM. 48

I wish to offer upon it, as I have done the papers
of Mr. Frederick Harrison for those just made on the
doctrine of Posthumous Activities. These are some
of her utterances which touch on the matter : —

I soon found myself quite outside of my old world of thought
and speculation, under a new heaven and a new earth, disem-
barrassed of a load of selfish cares and troubles. . . . Hence it fol-
lowed that the conceptions of a God with any human attributes
whatever, of a principle or practice of design, of an administration
of the affairs of the world by the principles of human morals, must
be mere visions, necessary and useful in their day, but not philo-
sophically or permanently true. . . . The reality that philosophy
founded upon science is the one thing needful, the source and
the vital principle of all morality and all peace to individuals and
good-will among men, had become the crown of my experience
and the joy of my life. . . . My comrade (Mr. Atkinson) and I
were both pioneers of truth. We both care for our kind, and
we could not see them suffering as we had suffered without im-
parting to them our consolation and our joy. Having found,
as my friend said, a spring in the desert, should we see the mul-
titude wandering in desolation, and not show them our refresh-
ment ? . . . Then (in younger days) I believed in a Protector, who
ordered my work and would sustain me under it; and, however
I may now despise that sort of support, I had it then, and have
none of that sort now. I have all that I want, . . . and I would
not exchange my present views, imperfect and doubtful as they
are, — I had better say I would not exchange my freedom from
old superstition,— if I were to be burned at the s ake next month,
for all the peace and quiet of Orthodoxy. Nor would I for my
exemption give up the blessing of the power of appeal to thought-
ful minds. . . . When I experienced the still new joy of feeling
myself to be a portion of the universe, resting on the security

44 MAGKAKIMOUS ATHEISM.

of its everlasting laws, certain that its Cause was wholly out of
the sphere of human attributes, and that the special destiny of
my race is infinitely nobler than the highest proposed under a
scheme of " divine moral government," how could it matter to
me that the adherents of a decaying mythology were still cling-
ing to their Man-Grod ? . . . Under this close experience (of ill-
ness), I find death in prospect the simplest thing in the world,
— a thing not to be feared or regretted or to get excited about
in any way. I attribute this very much to the nature of my
views of death. . . . Now, the release is an inexpressible comfort
I see that the dying naturally and regularly, imless disturbed,
desire and sink into death as into sleep. ... I feel no solicitude
about a parting which will bring no pain. . . . Under the eternal
laws of the universe I came into being, and under them I have
lived a life so full that its fulness is equivalent to length: thus
there is much in my life that I am glad to have enjoyed, and
much that generates a mood of contentment at its close. Besides
that, I never dream of wishing that anything were o^erwise
than as it is; and I am frankly satisfied to have done with life.
I have had a noble share of it, and I desire no more. I neither
wish to live longer here nor to find life again elsewhere. It seems
to me simply absurd to expect it.*

It is no part of the purpose of this article to
discuss the truth of the doctrine that there is no
God, and that death terminates human conscious-
ness. Nor yet do I question whether a high sense of
loyalty to what is understood to be truth may not
make it appear to any one holding such doctrines
that he is under the obligation to publish them

•AiOoUoffra^h/y, pp. 833, 438i

MAGNANIMOUS ATHEISM. 46

frankly to the world. Many a man who is an
Atheist as regards God holds (what many believers
in Him lack) a noble faith in Truth clb Truth, a firm
conviction that nothing can be better than Truth,
and that, as Carlyle said, " To nothing but error
can any truth be dangerous." It is not, then, the
holding of such views as those above quoted, nor yet
their frank publication and defence, wherewith we
are now concerned ; but with the tone of eaniltation
with which they are announced, the disregard and
contempt which are manifested for the dearest
hopes, the purest aspirations, of the great mass of
mankind.

Magnanimity has two phases. We may be mag-
nanimous on our own account, — brave, calm, and
self-reliant in the face of things which appall feebler
souls. Of this sort of personal magnanimity, this
remarkable woman has given a very fine example.
Here are the words she wrote twenty years after
the foregoing pages, in her last letter to her friend :

I cannot think of any future as at all probable except the
annihilation from which some people recoil with so much horror.
. . . For my part, I have no objection to such an extinction. I
well remember the passion wherewith W. E. Forster said to me,
''I had rather be damned than annihilated. '^ ... I have no wish
for any further experience, nor have I any fear of it.* . . .

•Harriet Martineau^s last letter to Mr. Atkinson, Ambleside, May 19,
1876, Atttobioffra^^, Vol. m., p. 463.

46 MAGNANIMOUS ATHEISM.

These words have in. them a calmness, simplicity,
and courage which demand our honor, written as
they were by an aged woman (as she herself de-
scribes them a few lines further) " under the clear
knowledge of death being so near at hand." The
old vulgar theory, so frequently harped upon in the
last generation, that the right place to judge a man's
religious views is his death-bed, and that, while
orthodox believers alone can die bravely, sceptics
must needs expire in anguish and alarm, with "a
certain fearful looking-for of judgment," has been
thoroughly exploded by the now numberless in-
stances of perfect courage exhibited by dying men
and women who had long before abandoned the
hopes of a happy futurity which revealed or natural
religion has to offer. Harriet Martineau's serene
self-resignation into eternal nothingness ought, if
any further evidence were wanting, to suffice to set
the matter finally at rest ; and it may be cited very
properly by disbelievers in immortality, as exhibit-
ing what they deem to be the fitting and dignified
tone of a philosophical mind drawing near to the
horizon beneath which it will presently disappear
forever. No one can help respecting courage, under
whatever form or circumstances it is manifested;
and, if a man think that he is on the verge of anni-
hilation, it is truly dignified and praiseworthy to

MAGNANIMOITS ATHEISM. 47

approach it with unflinching eye and unblenched
cheek. This is so far as the individtuil is concerned.
But is there not another and larger side of the ques-
tion, which the very noblest man oitght to feel as
awful and heart-rending, — nay, must feel to be so,
in proportion to his nobleness and his power to
extend his view beyond his own petty personality ?
True magnanimity, it seems to me, must look far
outside of a man's own lot, of his past share of life's
feast, and his readiness now to rise from it satisfied,
and must take a wide survey of the lives (so far
as they can be known or guessed) of all other men,
— of the poverty-stricken, the savage, the ignorant,
the diseased, the enslaved, the sin-degraded, — and
attain the conclusion that for these also, as well as
for himself, life on earth has been sufficient good,
and none other need be asked or desired before he
can complacently speak of the jotf of abandoning
faith in God and immortality. " I have had a noble
share of life, and I desire no more," is an expression
of personal sentiment which may or may not be
right and fitting on the assumed hypothesis. But
to join to such expression of individual contentment
no word of regret for the closing in of all hope to
the suffering millions of our race who have not had
" noble " shares of life, and who do, with yearning
hunger, desire more than has ever fallen to their lot,

48 MAGNANIMOUS ATHEISM.

— this is, as it seems to me, the reverse of magna-
nimity. This is littleness and selfishness almost as
bad as that of the bigots whom these Atheists abhor,
who rejoice to expect heaven for themselves, while
leaving thousands of their brethren to perdition. It
might be pardonable in one brought up to believe
in hell, and who hurriedly leaped to the doctrine of
annihilation from that intolerable yoke, and cried,
" Let us all perish together rather than that hideous
doom overtake a single creature 1" Such a choice
would be generous and worthy. But when a woman
who probably never, at any period of her life,
believed in the eternal perdition of a soul, proclaims
herself enraptured at the joy of finding out that
there is neither a God to protect the weak, nor,
finally, any holiness or happiness beyond the grave,

— then, I repeat, this is not magnanimity, but gigan-
tic selfishness.

Let us think a little what it would signify to
mankind to give up God and heaven, — that is, the
belief in God and heaven; for — God be praised! —
it rests with no philosophic school to put out the
sun or prevent the morning from breaking, but only
to blind our et/es to them.

Dr. James Martineau once made in a sermon the
startling remark that, "if it could be known that
God was dead, the news would cause but little

MAGKAinMOUS ATHEISM. 49

excitement in the streets of Berlin or Paris." The
observation was doubtless true ; for, of direct thought
of God, the streets of great cities are probably the
emptiest of any places wherein mortals may be
found. But there is an enormous share of human
ideas and feelings not directly or consciously turned
toward God, yet nevertheless colored by the belief
that such a Being exists. Perhaps it would be more
proper to say that in Christendom every idea and
every feeling have imperceptibly been built up on
the theory that there is a God. We see everything
with Him for a background. Inanimate nature and
the lower animals, human history and society, poetry,
literature, science, and art, — every one of them has
its religious aspect, which can only be excluded by
a mental tour deforce. Take inanimate nature, for
example, — the region where it seems easiest to
sever the links of habitual thought, and which the
doctrine of Evolution (according to some of its
teachers) has already withdrawn from the domain
of a Creative Power. We all love this nature; and
our hearts are moved to their depths by sympathy
with it when we gaze round of a summer morning
upon the woods and hills and waters, or, later in
the year, upon the "happy autumn fields" of ripened
com, or, on a winter's night, up into the solemn
host of stars. But is it merely the glittering

50 MAGNAKIMOnS ATHEISM.

"patines of bright gold," or fields of yellow wheat,
or the block of wood and rock which form the forest
or the mountain, which awaken in us such myste-
rious emotion ? Are we not dimly worshipping the
soul of nature through earth and sky, — the spirit
wherewith our spirits are in ineffable harmony, and
of which all the loveliness we behold is but the
shadow?

Let some Agnostic disenchanter come to us at
such an hour and tell us that, though it takes a
man of genius to depict worthily on canvas a corner
of this wide field of loveliness, yet that the whole
great original had no Painter, no Designer ; that the
mountains had no Architect, the well-balanced stars
no supreme Geometer, but that it all came about as
we behold it through the action of forces, unguided
by any mind, undirected by any Will, — and what
revulsion shall we not experience? Shall we not
feel like a man enamoured of a beautiful woman
whom he has believed to be good and wise and
tender, but, when he comes at last to look close into
her iace, he finds her to be a soulless idiot, from
whose stony and meaningless gaze he turns shudder-
ing away ?

Science, again, is but a mere heap of facts, not
a golden chain of truths, if we refuse to link it. to

MAGKAKlMOtrS ATHtSlBM. 6l

the throne of God.* In every department of human
thought, in short, something — and that something
the most beautiful in it — must be lost, some sacred
spell must be broken, if we are to think of it as
divested from the deeper sense which religion has
(all unconsciously to ourselves) given to it, — the
thread of purpose running through ; the understood
promise of justice; the sympathy of an unseen,
all-beholding Spectator.

In the same way, all human relationships will be
stripped of the majestic mantle under which they
have been sheltered. The idea of the common
Fatherhood of God, which Paganism in its best days
had begun to teach, and which Christ's lessons have
made the familiar thought of every European child,
has put a meaning into the phrase of human brother-
hood, which it is much to be doubted if the warmest
"Enthusiasts of Humanity" would, without such
preliminary training, have been able to give to it.
The idea (poorly as it has been hitherto recognized)
that the most degraded of mankind, those from
whom we naturally turn in disgust, have yet the

♦I have heard of two very great living philosophers who thought they
had pretty nearly got rid of Final Causes, but who, in talking together,
found it hard to avoid assuming their existence. One of tbem, in fact,
in detailing his own observations and discoveries concerning animals and
plaatiy used so often terms implying that there was Sk purpose visible in

52 MAOKAKIHOUS ATHBISM.

same Creator and the same Judge as ourselves, has,
beyond question, an indirect influence of no small
force over all our sentiments concerning them. The
same reflection has even at last begun to exercise
a perceptible influence over our conduct to the
brutes. Christians and Theists of eveiy shade may
be found impressed with the sense that religion
demands the humane treatment of all sentient creat-
ures; and this, whether they take the view of
Cardinal Manning, that, " if I owe no moral duties
to the lower animals, I owe all the moral duties that
are conceivable to the Creator of those animals, —
humanity, mercy, and care for them," or take the
simple Theist stand-point, that, as we love Him, so
we naturally look. with sympathy and tenderness
on everything He has made. Of course, this motive
of humanity to brutes disappears with the belief in
God; and, accordingly, we find, with quite logical
fitness, that, while the opposition to brute torture is
maintained by men of every varied shade of religion,
the majority of the chief vivisectors of Europe are
professed Materialists. Vivisection is the logical
outcome of Atheism as regards the brutes; and
M. Paul Bert and Carl Vogt are only the most
candid examples of men who have carried it out.

natural arrangements that his friend stopped him, and said, ** Mr. — ,
jcm are getting strangely e020o{oi7f0a2/ **

MAGNAinMOUS ATHEISM. ,68

But it is in the region of the personal virtues —
purity, truth, temperance, contentment — that the
loss of the belief in God will be most disastrous.
I am far from maintaining that, putting religion
wholly out of sight, there are not motives of a
purely ethical kind left which ought to make men
practise the highest inward virtue. But I think it
needs only a slight knowledge of human nature to
perceive that the shutting up of the window of the
sold, through which an awful and most holy Spec-
tator has hitherto been believed to gaze into aU its
secrets, must leave a great deal in darkness which
has been till now illumined with a sin-exposing light.
It takes much for a man to say, like the author of
In Memoriam^ —

*' The dead shall look me through and through."

The idea of any eye perceiving all that is going on
in the recesses of the mind, — the double motives,
the unfaithfulnesses, the vanities, the memories of
old shameful errors, — this is hard enough. But the
belief that such introspection is always taking place,
and by the Holiest of all beings, is undoubtedly a
sort of purification such as no mere solitary process
of self-examination can resemble. Even a warm
hmnan friendship in youth brings with it always
a burst of self-knowledge. We see ourselves quite

64 MAGKAimfOUS ATHEISM.

freshly in our friend's view of us. But a thousand
times greater inevitably is the self-revelation which
comes with the realized presence of God in the
soul, the flood of sunshine which discloses all the
motes which fiU the atmosphere of our thoughts.
Now, though it is only spiritually-minded men
who know this experience in its full intensity, yet
every man who believes in God has gleams of it at
intervals through life which are never afterward
quite forgotten. But, more (and this is a point
which concerns the whole Theistic moral argument
most importantly), the supreme experience of spir-
itual men is filtered dovm through aU grades of
minds by books and intercourse. The lofty stand-
ard of purity which has been revealed to them
is partially exhibited by their words and example,
and forms a kind of high-water mark for lesser
soids. It is an immense gain, even to very poor
sinners, that there should be a few rich saints ; and
every man who has attained a lofty conception of
holiness helps to make all the world around him
conscious of its unholiness. He is a mirror in a
dark place: the ray of light which has fallen on
him dispels somewhat of the gloom around.

Thus, if the belief in God be lost to humanity, we
shall lose not only the direct, the incalculable effects
on individual souls of the belief in a divine Searcher

MAGNANBiOXTS ATHEISH. 65

of Hearts, but also the indirect and uniyersal uplift-
ing influence on society of the presence o£ men who
have experienced such effects, and formed their
moral standard accordingly. Is it too much to
augur that the result will be a depreciation of the
common ideal standard, and a consequently still
further depression of the practical level of personal
virtue?

What is left, when religion is gone, to give to the
personal virtues of purity (of thought as well as of
act), of truth, temperance, and contentment, the
high status they ought to hold? These virtues, in
the history of the moral development of mankind,
are always the last to be recognized. In the earlier
ages of morality, nobody asks for more than negative
merits, — not to murder or rob or deal treacherously.
Then comes the great step, when the rabbinical pre-
cept, "Thou shalt not do to another what thou
wouldest not he should do to thee," is exchanged for
the positive Christian law, Bo to another what thou
woiddest he should do to thee. But only very
slowly, above and beyond all social duties, the prin-
ciple, " Be perfect, as thy Father in heaven is per-
fect," has dawned on mankind as the aim of life;
and how little it is yet the practical rule of conduct
there is no need to tell. Let us but let slip our faith
in the perfect Father in heaven, and will it not sink

56 MAGKAinHOUS ATHEISM.

again by degrees into oblivion? We shall hear a
great deal, doubtless (for a time, at all events), of
the duty of "laboring for the cause of humanity,"
and be encouraged by promises of "posthumous
activity." But where are the motives for personal
and secret virtue to come from, — that inward virtue
without which even warm social benevolence soon
becomes tainted? It must^ it would seem, fall more
and more into the background. There is, theoreti-
cally, no more reason for placing it forward : there is
no more any " end of creation " in contemplation, to
which the virtue of each soid, to be wrought out by
L its own struggles, must contribute its quotum . The
intrinsic moral character of each soul will no longer
be deemed the concern of any being except the
man himself, but only what each is able to achieve in
the way of contributing to the welfare of other people.
While the lesson of the higher ethics has been, " It
is more important to be good than to do good," that
of the new ethics must inevitably be, "It is very
important what you do : it is of the smallest possible
consequence what you are except in so far as your
neighbors may know it and be affected thereby."

In another way, also, I think morality would be
affected enormously, though still indirectly, by the
downfall of religion. Many of my readers wUl
recall a very able article on Atheism in the National

/

MAGNANIMOUS ATHEISM. 67

Review for January, 1856, by Mr. R. H. Hutton, in
which it was maintained that " Atheism has no lan-
guage by which it can express the infinite nature
of moral distinctions. ... It is not, as has been
falsely said, that right and wrong take their dis-
tinction from measures of duration, but that faith in
infinite personal life, and in communion with or
separate from infinite good, is the only articulate
utterance which our conscience can find for its
sense of the absolutely boundless significance it sees
in every moral choice." Take away this expression
of the infinite nature of moral distinctions, and the
sense of it will very rapidly dwindle away.

And, after all, can it be said in the same sense,
under an Atheistic as under a Theistic creed, that
moral distinctions are "infinitely" significant? Is
there any " infinite " left for us to talk about, when
we have abolished God and immortality? Some
few thousands of years ago, on the Atheistic
hypothesis, when man was just emerging from
apehood, there was no Being anywhere who distin-
guished right from wrong ; * and some few thousand
years to come, when the final glacial period sets in,

* Or at least our right from wrong ; for, on Mr. I>arwin'8 showing,
there may, it seems, be a different right and wrong for creatures differ-
ently constituted in other worlds, whose interests, being different, will
cause different *' sets " of their brains toward the lines of action useful to
their tribes accordingly.

58 MAGKANIMOXTS ATHEISM.

there will be nobody left to know anything about
it. There is no Being now in whom righteousness
is impersonated, nor any world to come wherein
the injustices of this will be rectified. From the
eternal and immutable law of the universe, the

hypa-rrra K^aipaX^ deijv vdfufia^ which Sophoclcs held it tO

be, the moral law has sunk to a mere "Rule of
Thumb," whereby certain ephemeral creatures on
our small planet find it most beneficial, on the whole,
to regulate their behavior. Is it in the nature of
things to pay to such a rule the sort of obedience
and reverence we have paid to the divine law?
And if, with the very highest sanctions which can
be conceived, that law has but too often failed to
secure our obedience against the temptations of self-
ishness and passion, does anybody expect that, when
it is divested of all those sanctions, it will prevail
even so far as it has done hitherto ?

These are some of the indirect ways in which
mankind must lose beauty and truth and goodness,
as it loses faith in God and immortality. But the
direct losses inevitably to follow are, if possible,
graver still.

The course of the moral life, after it has been com-
menced in earnest, probably passes through the same
two great phases in almost every man who lives long
enough. At first, duty is a hard effort and all effort.

MAGNANIMOUS ATHEISM. 59

A strong hand seems to be laid on the man, urging
him up a toilsome road. Every evil tendency of liis
nature has to be separately fought with and trampled
down, every act of self-sacrifice for others to be per-
formed with exertion of his will. The man labors
heroically under his stern sense of duty, taking con-
solation in it as duty, but still looking rather to
fulfil his obligation than desirous that the end of
each task should be accomplished. If he die at this
stage, it is in some sense a release. He has dis-
charged his duty as a soldier, and is glad to lay down
his arms. If he be a religious man, he hopes to hear
it said to him, "Well done, good and faithful ser-
vant ! enter thou into the joy of thy Lord."

But if a man live many years, striving in earnest,
however failingly, to do his duty, there comes by
degrees a change in his condition. Old temptations
lie down; and, if no new ones arise to give him
trouble, the friction of the inner life diminishes so
sensibly that he is apt to be alarmed lest he be grow-
ing indifferent. As to his positive duties, those
which he has been fulfilling merely because he felt
it laid upon him to undertake them, by degrees they
acquire interest for him for their own sake. He is
intensely anxious for the success of his labors, and
no longer measures his efforts by what may be con-
sidered his moral obligations. He wants such and

60 MAOKANIMOnS ATHEISM.

such aged or suffering persons to be relieved, such
sinners to be reclaimed, such children trained to
virtue, such truths published, such wrongs redressed,
such useful laws or reforms or discoveries intro-
duced. There is no need now for him to spur him-
self by reflections that it is his duty to work for
these ends: the difficulty with him now lies to
moderate his work with a view to the preservation
of health and strength. It would be cruelty to tell
him his task has been honorably fulfilled, though the
object of it has failed. He woidd cry, " Let me be
accounted a faithless servant, but let the work be
accomplished by another, and I shall be content."
If he die now^ he takes very little comfort from
thinking he has discharged his duty. The work is
not finished, and will miss his hand. He says, as
Theodore Parker said to me on his death-bed: "I
am not afraid to die, but I wish I might carry on
my work. I have only half used the powers God
gave me."

Now, in all this history of the moral life, it
appears that no ostensible difference need exist
between the sentiments of an Atheist and a Theist,
provided we can carry the Atheist safely to the second
stage of progress. Once there, it is evident that no
change in his opinions about God or loss of hope of
heaven will practically affect his conduct. The

1CAGKANIM0X7S ATHEISM. 61

habits of self-control whereby he has ruled his pas-
sions will not be lost, the interest he has taken in
unselfish objects will not dwindle. He will go on to
the end, laboring for the good of his kind, and regret
his own death mamly because it will stop those
labors. But how are ordinary men, of no specially
elevated moral fibre, to be carried up to that
turning-point where Law is superseded by love ? I
am far from thinking that men may not and do not
often begin their self-reformation when they are (so
far as their own consciousness goes) quite alienated
from God or disbelieving his existence. T know, on
the contrary, that it is no uncommon experience that
this should be so. But, in the ordinary history of
the soul, the resolute effort to obey conscience after
a very little time brings with it a sense, first dim,
then shining more to the perfect day, that there is
(as Mr. Matthew Arnold says) "a Power not
ourselves which makes for righteousness"; or, in
plainer revelation, that God watches and helps the
soul which strives to do right. Henceforth, the
mechanical moral effort is aided by the electric force
of religion, burning away the dross of sin in the fire
of a divine Presence, and making self-sacrifice sweet
as an offering of love. But if this normal process,
whereby morality leads up to religion and becomes
thereby aided through all future effort, is to be

62 MA6KANIMOT7S ATHEISM.

rigidly prohibited by reason, if we are to starve out
the religious sentiment as a passion not to be in-
dulged by a rational being, then, I ask, how many
are the men and women who, after their first good
resolutions, will persist in the course of arduous
moral effort long enough to reach that stage when
duty becomes comparatively easy? Where are the
aids to come from to keep them from self-indulgence ?
We have seen that the moral law itself is to be
represented to them as merely an hereditary set of
the brain ; that they are not to dream there is any
Holy Eye looking at them, any strong Hand ready
to aid their feeble steps, any Infinite Love drawing
them to itself, any Life beyond the grave where the
imperfect virtue of earth shall grow and blossom in
eternal beauty. All these ideas are to be resolutely
dismissed. The habit of prayer (irreparable, im-
measurable loss) is to be discarded. Nothing is to
be left save only the one motive of the Enthusiasm
of Humanity, which is to replace God and con-
science and heaven. Let me speak out concerning
this much-boasted modern sentiment.

I have heard a good man, one of the best men I
know, preaching on this subject, and saying: "Do
you ask why should you love your neighbor?
Because you cannot help itT^ Now, as I listened
to that genuine philanthropist's utterance, my heart

MAOKAKIMOUS ATHSSBlC. 6S

smote me, and I said to myself: "But I could help
it, and only too easily! It comes to him sponta-
neously, I have no doubt, to love his neighbors ; but
I have been trying to do it for many years, and have
very imperfectly succeeded. Instead of beginning
with love, and going on to duty toward them as the
result of love, T have had to begin with duty, and,
only with many a self-reproach for hardness of spirit,
learned at last to feel love — for some of them I "

I do not think my experience is exceptional. I
think the people who can and do love spontaneously
that terribly large section of our race who are com-
monplace, narrow-minded, and small of heart, are
the exceptions, and that, if we are to have no be-
nevolence except from born philanthropists like the
good man I have named, we shall see very little in
future of the Enthusiasm of Humanity.

No I It takes, for most of us, all the help to loving
our brother which comes from believing that we
have a commpn Father and a common home, — aU
the help which comes to the heart in answer to the
prayer that God would melt its stoniness, and make
it blossom into tenderness and sympathy, — to enable
us to attain the love which is not the spring of
social duty, but its climax^ — the "fulfilling of the
law."

I honestly think that the process of making

64 MAONANIMOUS ATHEISM.

Atheists, trained as sibch^ into philanthropists, will
be but rarely achieved. And I venture to propound
the question to those who point to admirable living
examples of Atheistic or Comtist philanthropy, —
How many of these have passed through the earlier
stage of morality as believers in Q-od^ and with all
the aid which prayer and faith and hope could give
them? That they remain actively benevolent, having
advanced so far, is (as I have shown above) readily
to be anticipated. But will their children stand
where they stand now? We are yet obeying the
great impetus of religion, and running along the
rails laid down by our forefathers. Shall we con-
tinue in the same course when that impetus has
stopped, and we have left the rails altogether? I
fear me not.

In brief, I think the outlook of Atheism, as a
moral educator^ as black as need be. Viewed with
the utmost candor, and admitting all the excellence
of many of its disciples, I think Atheism must
deduct from morality the priceless training to rever-
ence afforded by religion; the illuminating con-
sciousness of an unseen Searcher of hearts; the
invigorating confidence in an Almighty Helper; the
vivifying influence of divine love; and, finally,
the immeasurable, inestimable benefits derivable
from that practice of prayer which is God's own
education of the soul.

MAGNAITIHOnS ATHEISM. 65

But, whatever may be its results as a system of
moral training, Atheism, in its ultimate aspect, must
be, to every religious man and woman who is driven
to adopt it in later life, the setting of the sun which
has warmed and brightened existence. We may
live in the twilight; but that which gave to pros-
perity its joy, to grief its comfort, to duty its delight,
to love its sweetness, to solitude its charm, to all
life its meaning and purpose, and to death its perfect
consolation and support, is lost forever. There are
no words to tell what that loss must be, — worst of
all to those who are least conscious of it, and who
have therefore lost with their faith in God those
spiritual faculties in the exercise of which man has
his higher being, and of which the pains are better
worth than all the pleasures of earth.

Atheism involves a far worse loss to humanity than
the exclusion of the belief in a Life after Death;
but we can form no fair estimate of the deduction
which our complacent Agnostics are prepared to
make from the sum of human virtue and happiness,
if we do not thoroughly realize what it is they are
talking of when they tell us so cheerfully to abandon
the hope of Immortality, as well as the belief in God,
and that they are quite satisfied to do both.

As far as each individual is personally concerned,
such Hope is of course a very variable sentiment.

66 ICAGKANIMOtTS ATHEISM.

There are those who say (as Miss Martineau men-
tions Mr. W, E. Forster saying to her), "I would
rather be damned than annihilated." And there are
others who say, as she does herself, "I have had a
very noble share of life, and I do not ask any more."
With the latter feeling per «e, no one has a right to
quarrel. To many, no doubt, especially persons of
feeble bodily health or overstrained conscientious-
ness, the notion of final repose is more grateful than
that of an immortality of activity. They feel in our
day, as it would seem almost everybody did in more
trying times, that it was the "rest which remaineth
for the people of God," beyond the storms of the
world, — the "everlasting beds of rest" on which the
weary may lie, — rather than our more modern notion
of a Heaven of Progress, to which they aspire.
There are Buddhists of the West as of the East, to
whom, by some natural or acquired habit of mind,
existence itself seems a burden ; and they extend the
taedium vitae which they feel here by anticipation to
any future state to which they could be transferred.
With such persons as these, as I have just said, we
have no claim to contend, even though we may
think, with Tennyson, that, if they knew themselves
better, they would recognize that, even in uttermost

lassitude,

" 'Tis life of which our veins are scant ;
O Life, not Death, for which we pant ;
More Hfe, and fuller, that we want.*'

MAC^KAKIMOTTS AtHEISM. 67

The dreams of men as to what they desire beyond
the grave are infinitely varied, from Nirvana to Val-
halla ; and nothing is to be said, so far as he himself
is concerned, respecting a man who wishes it to be
written on his tombstone that he

** From iN'ature's temperate feast rose satisfied,
Thanked Heaven that he had lived and that he died,"

except this, — that his choice of eternal sleep betrays
the fact that there is no one in this world or the next
whom he loves well enough to wish to be awakened to
meet him again. Of course, a man may have abun-
dance of kindly and dutiful sentiments for his rela-
tives and friends, and yet (thinking they will do well
enough without him) be satisfied to quit them for
ever. But I cannot believe that any one who has
ever lost the object of the higher and more absorbing
human affection, or who leaves behind him in dying
one united to him by such transcendent love, can
fail passionately to desire immortality. He may
resign himself through philosophy or religion (if his
religion take the strange and rare form of belief in
God and disbelief in a life to come) to see his
l)eloved one no more. But not to desire to meet, at
any cost of unwelcome ages of life, the being we
profess to love supremely, seems to be a contradic-
tion in terms. Were there to loom before us worlds

68 KAGNANIMOnS ATHEISM.

to climb, and centuries of labor, we would surely
thankfully go through them all to reach the hour
when we shall say,

'^ Soul of my soul, I shall meet thee again I
And with God he the rest"

But because a loveless man may, without blame,
be content to let death drop a final curtain on his
consciousness, it is quite another matter for him to
be equally placidly resigned to the extinction of the
hopes of others, who have had no such feast of life
as he, or who yearn for the renewal of affection
hereafter. As I have elsewhere attempted to show,
in a little parable, such resignation an behalf of other
people is very much like that of Dives,* who, having
fared sumptuously, should be contented to let Laz-
arus starve.

Nor is it only the comfort of expecting to see our
beloved ones again which we shall lose with the hope

* The following letter appeared In the Spectator : —

Sib,— Indulging in the pernicious habit of reading in bed, 1 last night
perused with profound interest Mr. Greg*s letter in your current number,
your own remarks thereupon, and also Mr. Greg's generous defence of his
old friend, Harriet Martineau, in the Nineteenth Century. As my eyes
closed on the last paragraph of this article, I seemed to behold a vision,
which I shall take leave to describe to you.

Dives had just eaten a particularly plentiful dinner, and was standing
at the door of a pretty cottage in Ambleside. Lazarus, looking up at him,
said pitifully, " I perish with hunger." Thereupon, Dives observed, with
great serenity : " Lazarus, I have had an excellent dinner. There is not
a crumb left. But I am quite content, and you ought to be the Bftme,"

MAGNANIMOUS ATHEISM. 69

of a future life. I am persuaded that a great deal of
the higher part of love itself will fade out of human
existence altogether, if that hope be generally aban-
doned. Every one knows how friendship and mar-
riage are hallowed by the thought of their perpetuity
even in this worid, and how a union is debased if it
be, consciously to those who make it, temporary and
transitory. Hitherto, we have loved one another as
immortal beings^ as creatures whose affections be-
longed to the exalted order of eternal things. When
that ennobling and sanctifying element evaporates,
when Love, like everything else, is reduced to a
question of days and months and years, will it not
undergo somewhat of the degradation which now
belongs to the brief contracts of passion? Even

Poor LazaraSi howeveri instead of seeming satisfied, wailed yet more
sadly : " But I hanger, Dives I I hunger for the bread of life I I hanger
for human love, of which I had only begun to taste, when it was snatched
away. I hunger for justice, of which such scant measure has been dealt
me, and to millions like me. I hunger for truth, I hunger for beauty, I
hunger for righteousness, I hunger for a love holy, divine, and perfect,
which alone can satisfy my soul. I hunger, Dives I I hunger, and you
tell me there is not a crumb left of the rich feast of existence, and bid me
be content. It is a cruel mockery."

Then Dives answered yet more placidly : " I never dream of wishing
anything were otherwise than it is. I am frankly satisfied to have done
with life. I have had a noble share of it, and I desire no more. I utterly
disbelieve in a future life."

At that moment, my respected friend Mr. Greg passed by, and heard
what Dives was saying; on which, to my great surprise, he made the
foUowing observation: « This is, unquestionably, the harder— may it not

70 MAGNAKBiOnS ATHEISM.

those who might still be able to feel all the holiness
of love would, when they learned it was destined to
end in the agony of eternal separation, check them-
selves from indulging a sentiment leading up inevita-
bly to such a termination, just as a man would turn
from a path ending in a precipice.

Thus, I believe, the affections must irretrievably
suffer from the loss of the hope of inmiortality. So
must, in a measure, the intellect and the imagination,
driven from the wider expanse back on that poor
fleshly life which is to be the end-all of man, and
which must be destined to assume an importance it
has never possessed since our race emerged from its
brute and barbarian origin. Nor would our moral
life fail to suffer also very grievously, though in
another way from that which has been alleged. I
think we can scarcely now estimate the minifying

cUso he the higher? -^ form of pioua resignatioiii the last achievement of
the ripened mind."

As for Lazarus, on catching Mr. Greg's remark, he tamed himself
painfully on the ground, and groaned: ** I never heard before of anybody
heiDg * piotialy resigned* to the woes and wants of other people. La
Rochefoucauld was right, I suppose, to say, *Xoti8 avona Urns aasez de
force pour supporter lea maux d'autrui*; but, for my part, I should not
precisely call Dives' satisfaction In his * noble share * of the feast, while
I am doomed to perish starving, by quite so fine a name as * pious
resignation.' Pray, Mr. Greg, with your large humanity, take my case
Into consideration, before you credit Dives with anything better than
stupendous egotism."

Startled by the vehemence of poor Lazams, I awoke.
I am, Sir, etc.

MAGNANIMOUS ATHEISM. 71

consequences of closing all outlook beyond this
world, and shutting up morality within the narrow
sphere of mortal life. As I have said in my Eope%
of the Human JRace^ it is not possible we should con-
tinue to attach to virtue and vice the same profound
significance, when we believe their scope to reach no
further than our brief span, and justice to be a
dream of our puny race never to be realized
throughout the eternal ages. In theory, right and
wrong must come to be regarded as of compara-
tively trivial importance ; and, practically, the virtue
destined shortly to be extinguished forever must
seem to the tempted soul scarcely deserving of an
effort. Life, after we have passed its meridian, must
become in our eyes more and more like an autumn
garden, wherein it would be vain to plant seeds of
good which can never bloom before the frosts of
death, and useless to eradicate weeds which must be
killed erelong without our labor. Needless to add
that of that dismal spot it may soon be said, —

" Between the time of the wind and the snow,
All loathsome things hegan to grow" ;

and, when the winter comes at last, none will regret
the white shroud it throws over corruption and
decay.

But it is when we come to think of humanity as a

72 HAGNANIMOUS ATHEISM.

whole that the. prospect of final extinction appears so
unutterably deplorable, so lame and impotent a con-
clusion for all the struggles, the martyrdoms, and
the prayers of a hundred generations who have gone
to the grave in hope and faith, and perished there.
We English men and women have been wont to
think proudly of the vast geographical extension of
our country's dominion, the grandeur of the Empire
on which the sun never sets ; and the remark has
often been made that there is not a petty corpora-
tion or board in the kingdom whose proceedings are
not, in a degree, dignified by the sense of England's
greatness. The politicians who have expressed a
readiness to give up our Colonies have been taunted,
and justly, with lack of the nobler patriotism which
regards not only financial and administrative details,
but the larger interests and glory of what we have
delighted to call our Imperial Race. But what
would be the loss to the prestige of England of the
severance of Australia and Canada and India, com-
pared to the loss to mankind of that glorious empery
of Immortality in which it has prided itself since the
beginning of history? Everything we have achieved
and thought — our literature, art, laws, kingdoms,
churches — has all been wrought and built up in
this faith, which has given value to the soul of the
humblest child, and added grandeur to the most

MAGNANIMOUS ATHEISM. 78

splendid deeds of the hero and the martyr. With
that hope disappears not only the consolation of all
bereaved hearts, but the very crown upon the head
of humanity.

It is no argument for the truth of any opinion
that the disclosure of its falsehood may have dis-
astrous consequences. Nothing that has been ad-
vanced in this paper proves, or has been offered as
proof, that there is a God or a life to come. The
foundations for those beliefs belong to a different
order of considerations. But I think thus much
may be presumed to have resulted from our inquiry ;
namely, that their value to the virtue and the hap-
piness of mankind is so incalculably vast that the
work of demolishing them ought to be carried on, by
men professing to love their kind, in a very different
spirit from that which is generally exhibited by
Agnostics. Even if their position be true, and if
they be morally bound to make known to the
world that such is the case, and to put an end to
the baseless dream which has deluded our race for
so many thousand years, — even granting this, I
think it remains clear that their task is one to be
undertaken only under the sternest sense of duty,
and with immeasurable moumfulness and regret.

74 MAGNANIMOUS ATHEISM.

I think that, instead of rejoicing over the discovery
of "a spring in the desert," it behooves them to
weep tears, bitter as ever fell from human eyes, over
the grave wherein they bury the Divine Love and
the Immortal Hope of our (miserable) race.

HYGEIOLATRY.

EYGEIOLATRY.

The advance of physical science and the simul-
taneous retreat of religious faith threaten, among
their numerous consequences, to introduce a new
principle into morals. We may call it Doctor's Doc-
trine, — not because it is by any means the exclusive
property of the medical profession, or that all doc-
tors can be supposed to hold it, but because it is
more rife among them and tells more directly on
their work than in the case of other men. It is
indeed excusable for a physician to attribute to
bodily health, wherewith this new principle is con-
cerned, more importance than a poet, a preacher, or
a soldier, is likely to concede to it; and to this
natural tendency is added, pretty frequently perhaps,
a tolerably defined materialism, which not merely
connects but identifies genius, happiness, and virtue
with physical soundness, and stupidity, misery, and
crime with diseased organization. With such views,
and deprived of that vista of an eternal future which
alone gives to human things their true perspective,

78 HYOSIOLATBT.

it is not wonderful that many should come to regard
bodily health as the iummum bonum^ and thence to
deduce the principle to which I desire to call atten-
tion as an innovation in ethics. Reduced as nearly
as possible to a formula, that principle is as follows:

That any practice which, in the opinion of eorperta^
conduces to bodily health or tends to the cure of dis-
ease^ becomes^ ipso facto, morally lawfvl and right.

I do not mean to imply that this principle has yet
been clearly stated by any of its adherents, or that
they are even generally conscious that they have
adopted it. Possibly, many who have practically
embodied it in their conduct for years may repudiate
it on seeing it defined in words. Nevertheless, it
may be traced as the substructure of innumerable
arguments on all manner of subjects of public and
private interest, — arguments which, if the principle
were knocked from under them, would instantly be
seen to fall baseless to the ground. It is, in short,
the implied major term of a thousand syllogisms
which we hear in every debate and read in every
magazine and newspaper.

Now, to measure the extent of the change which
the adoption of this Doctor's Doctrine must intro-
duce into ethics, it is only necessary to cast a glance
backward at the older view of the relation of duty
to health which has hitherto prevailed in the world,

HTGBIOLATBT. TO

and been taught pretty equally by moralists of every
school, with the exception of ascetics on one side,
and pure hedonists on the other. That older lesson
— which we may for convenience call Divine's Doc-
trine, since it is the general teaching of every Prot-
estant theologian and moralist, may be summed up
in the canon —

Bodily health may not be lawfully sacrificed to our
desire of pleasure or fear of pain. It may and
ought to be sacrificed to the health of our souls^ to the
service of our fellowmen^ or to fidelity to God.

In other words, it has been taught that the man
who injures his health by debauchery is guilty of a
serious moral offence, and he who commits suicide
is guilty of a crime; but that, on the other hand,
the man who sacrifices his health in the performance
of his duty as physician, clergyman, or soldier, or in
endeavoring to save a fellow-creature from flood or
fire, or who gives up life itself rather than forswear
himself or renounce his religious faith, or commit
a base or unclean action, is not only exonerated
from any guilt, but is, in the highest degree, virtuous.

On these lines, Christian civilization may be said
to have been built up. The natural selfishness of
human nature has been counteracted by the sense
of duty ; and if, now and then, needless and exag-
gerated self-sacrifices without adequate reason have

80 HTOMOIiATBY.

been made, and there was room for brave Charles
Eongsley to preach the claims of the natural laws
of life, a thousand times more often has the sense
of duty enabled men and women to perform alike
the painful daily tasks whereby our homes are made
beautiful and sacred, and the occasional acts of
heroism wherewith human existence on earth is
crowned and glorified.

It needs no words to prove to any one who
reflects that two-thirds of what we have been wont
to reverence as homely virtue and all the martyr-
doms of history consist precisely in the voluntary
sacrifice of health, or of health and life together.
To withhold from such sacrifices the meed of moral
admiration would be to reverse the judgment of all
the ages, — to prefer Sardanapalus and Heliogabalus
to Curtius and Regulus, and to treat as a deluded
fanatic the apostle who converted the Gentile world,
but spent his years in perils by sea and land amid
prisons and scourgings. From the crucifixion of
Christ to the silent self-immolation of the poor
consumptive girl who works half-blinded through
the winter's night to support her aged mother, the
holiest and the sweetest things this earth has wit-
nessed have been the actions of those who counted
not their lives dear to them, so long as they could
obey the law of truth, of righteousness, and of love.

HYGBIOLATBY. 81

But how is this recognition of the duty and glory
of the sacrifice of health and life at the call of every
higher law to be reconciled with the " Doctor's Doc-
trine" that the interests of health are so supreme
that they themselves constitute the highest law, and
render any practice conducive to them ipso facto
lawful? Either we must admit, according to the
Divine's Doctrine, that moral interests transcend
bodily interests, or we must hold, according to
Doctor's Doctrine, that bodily interests transcend
moral interests. There is no third alternative.
One principle or the other must prevail, and sooner
or later leaven society with its ennobling or else its
debasing influence. There are signs apparent that
the Doctor's Doctrine is already bearing its proper
fruit, and that, soothed by a becalmed conscience,
absolved by the authority of the priesthood of Sci-
ence, men and women are beginning to be syste-
matically selfish and self-indulgent where their
health is concerned, or where there may appear a
chance of curing their maladies in modes not
hitherto witnessed. I can only indicate a few of
the ways in which this deliberate self-preservation
is exhibited.

Notably, it seems that the old courage of English-
men is dwindling away. Almost every month, cases
oome to light wherein men, even soldiers, fail to

stand by their conurades in danger; or wherein a
crowd of fifty people witness a child drowning in
a shallow pond without an effort to save it ; or men
who witness a cruel murder rush from the spot,
leaving the yet breathing victim dying unaided
on the ground. There is even, among young men,
a cynical avowal of prudent concern for their own
lives and limbs which constantly strikes the old, who
remember the joyous youthful fearlessness of their
fathers, as something altogether new and far indeed
from pleasant to contemplate.

Nor are our personal acts of selfishness and cow-
ardice on a small scale the only logical conse-
quences of the new principle which are already
visible. Cruelty of the most heinous and system-
atic kind is another result. The unanimous reso-
lution passed by the great Medical Congress in the
year of grace 1881 has proclaimed that vivisection
leads to discoveries conducive to the cure of
disease, and therefore should be sanctioned and left
unrestricted by law. That is to say, that all the
fiendish imaginations of men like Mantegazza and
Schiff, and Goltz and Bernard, and Paul Bert,
should be freely permitted in England for the sake
of a chance of useful hints for therapeutic science.
Thus, the whole medical profession in England
stands committed to the demand that the vice of

BYmHOhATRY. 88

cruelty in young men and old should be deliberately
unchained, expressly for the sake of anticipated ben-
efits to bodily health.

So far indeed has Doctor's Doctrine made its way
that, whenever any Bill concerning sanitary measures
or public hygiene is before Parliament, there is ex-
hibited by the speakers in the House, and by the
journalists who discuss the matter, a readiness to
trample on personal rights to an extent which would
excite indignation, were any religious or commercial
interest in question. Men may spread the most
deadly moral diseases, and teach doctrines which
make virtue a mockery and life a hopeless desola-
tion, and scarcely an effort is made to stop them.
But let them threaten to spread bodily disease,
and (unless they be medical men, and thus author-
ized transmitters of infection) the most stringent
measures are adopted ; and besides a Compulsory
Vaccination Act and the ever-infamous Contagious
Diseases Acts, even while these sheets are passing
through the press, no less than three Bills are before
Parliament to make compulsory the notification of
infectious disease and segregation of infected per-
sons. I am not now discussing the merits of these
Acts and Bills: I am only observing that the spirit
wherewith they are carried forward is quite an in-
novation in English legislation. Health of body has

84 HYGMOLATBY.

been accorded the importance which the — real or
supposed — interests of the soul alone commanded
two centuries ago ; and the tyranny of the priest-
hood of Hygeia threatens to be as high-handed as
ever was that of the Churches of Rome or of Geneva.
Lastly there is, outside of legislation, and hidden
from the knowledge of the majority of the laity,
one remaining application of the new principle of
morals which more than all exhibits its evil, its dis-
astrous tendency. For obvious reasons, I cannot
write plainly of this moral poisoning, which I believe
to be going on to a frightful extent, both in this
country and abroad. I can only quote some obser-
vations made on it by an experienced minister of
religion, published in the Modern Review for April,
1880: —

Any one who wiU make a few casual inquiries will be amazed
to discover the frequency with which medical men of high repute
— men who are admitted to the friendship of good and unsus-
pecting women — offer counsel to young men, and even to boys,
which strikes at the root of all morality, and indeed can pro-
ceed from nothing else than scepticism concerning the very possi-
bility of morality itself. We speak what we know not of one,
but of many, and what no medical man will deny, though many
a medical man will revolt from the action of his fellow-practi-
tioners as vehemently as we ourselves. What we ask of these
purer spirits in the healing fraternity is that they will sx>eak out
on this and other matters of professional practice, and condemn
their less honorable colleagues with no faltering tongue.

HYGEIOLATBT. 85

The Bishop of Bedford taking the chair at the
meeting, May 3 of the present year (1882), of the
Social Purity Alliance, alluded to this heavy charge
against the medical profession in the following
terms: "I know what doctors say, and I here pub-
licly protest against the terrible thing that is often
said by doctors to young men, — that sin is good for
their health. I say God forgive those who have
said it."

But it will be replied: "All these evils have
existed for ages. There have always been found
selfish, cruel, cowardly, and profligate men, ready to
transgress when their inclinations goaded them, will-
ing to rank their own health, life, and enjoyment
far before the law of God or the interest of their
fellows. What signifies, then, a new formula of
selfishness?"

It signifies, I venture to say, a great deal. Hith-
erto, men did evil; but they (or their neighbors for
them) had at least the grace to recognize that it
was evil. The selfish man was charged with selfish-
ness. The cruel man did not assume the airs of a
benefactor of mankind. The coward was kicked as
a poltroon, not rewarded with sympathetic smiles
for his candor. The man who sought the dens of
vice did not go thither with his conscience pacified
by his physician's orders in his pocket. To teaoh

86 BTGSIOLATBY.

men that "a practice conducive to health is ipso
facto morally right" is then, at one and the same
moment, to damp every aspiration after the nobler
kinds of virtue, and to supply a justification for
every meaner kind of vice.

Neither selfishness, nor cowardice, nor cruelty,
nor unchastity, can be justifiable by the plea that
they may conduce to the bodily health of one man
or of a thousand men ; and he who will save his life
by such means will assuredly lose all that makes
"life worth living," all for which life was given.

PESSIMISM, AND ONE OF ITS PRO-
FESSORS.

PESSIMISM, AND ONE OF ITS PROFESSOES.

The Rise and Progress of Buddhism in Europe
may possibly form the subject of a long chapter in
the hands of a Mosheim of the twentieth century.
Hitherto, among all Western nations, not less than
among the Jews, there has been a tolerable unani-
mous consensus that life, on the whole, is good, and
that it is a pleasant thing for the eyes to behold the
sun. Happiness, like health, has been assumed to be
the normal condition of sentient beings ; and misery,
like disease, to be exceptional and abnormal. The
dead have been pitied, inasmuch as they had passed
away from so pleasant a world ; more especially so
by those classic peoples who believed that the de-
parted dwelt in an insubstantial realm of shadows.
No energetic Northern race, however, contented itself
with a twilight Hades, but built up in imagination
a Valhalla of feast and war for the worshipper of
Odin; and, for the disciple of the Druid, a glorious
ascension from the darkness of " Abred" to the light
and felicity of " Gwynfyd." Christianity, in its per-

90 PESSIMISM, AND ONE OF ITS PEOFESSOBS.

verted forms, Catholic ascetic and Calvinist, took
away, indeed, much of the joyfulness of the old
heathen world, and made divines speak of our
earthly abode as a "city of wrath" or "vale of
tears." But they were all the more urgent that
men should fight the good fight, of which the crown
should be ^^life everlasting" in the New Jerusalem;
and, for the majority of their flocks, even if this
sinful planet remained, it would appear at all times,
i sufficiently desirable habitation to make depart-
ure from it unwelcome.

Brought up in these common views, probably not
one of us modern Europeans has perused, for the
first time, a philosophical statement of the pessimist
principles which underlie the vast religions of the
farther East, without a shock of astonishment. Indi-
vidually, we may have found our particular share of
existence painful rather than pleasurable. Disease,
poverty, disappointment, bereavement, may have em-
bittered our years. But that any order of men,
outside of lunatic asylums, should lay down as a
postulate, whereon to build religion and morality,
that Life is per se an evil, and that, "whatever we
have been, 'tis something better not to be," and
proceed benevolently to point out how we may, by
much diligence, shake off not only this mortal coil,
but the entire burden of being, and arrive at the

raaszMiBM, Am> oms of its pbofessobs. 91

consummation of nonenity, — this is an idea revolu-
tionizing the order of our conceptions, and as nearly
incredible as any assertion dealing with the vagaries
of the human mind may be. Even yet, perhaps,
some doubts may legitimately linger as to whether
the Buddhist creed, elsewhere than in Nepaul
(where it certainly does not teach annihilation),
really intends by "Nirvana" to set forth the
emptiness, rather than the plenitude, of being.
But that both Brahmin and Buddhist teachers have
systematically dealt with life as an evil rather
than as a good, there is, I apprehend, no question
among competent inquirers. Here, then, are two
absolutely contrasted, fundamental conceptions of
the totality of human existence, — the Western, that
life is a blessing; the Eastern, that it is a curse.
The European cries, —

" 'Tis life, not death, for which we pant, —
More life, and fuller, that we want."

He "shudders at destruction," and better endures
to face even the tremendous threat of an eternal
liell than to relax the tenacity of his belief in an
immortal consciousness. The Indian, on the con-
trary, devoutly hopes that a life (or several lives)
of self-abnegation, may bring him to the bourne
whence the traveller leaps into the gulf of nothing-
ness. Marvellous to add, as climax, there seems

92 PESSIMISM, AND ONE OF ITS PBOFESSOBS.

more likelihood that a certain number of highly
educated Germans, Frenchmen, and Englishmen,
may learn to sigh for Nirvana than that our mis-
sionaries will induce an equal number of intelligent
Singalese, Chinese, or natives of Siam, to exchange
their dreary anticipations for the hope of heaven.

Not to exaggerate the importance of the " School "
(if such it can be accounted) of European Buddhists,
we may, I think, properly afford to its existence the
attention due to a remarkable "fault" in the strata
of recent thought, and still more fitly ponder on
the significant tokens, scattered through current lit-
erature, of pessimist tendencies quite other than the
Western world has hitherto exhibited. Our modern
owls may be heard responding to each other in their
turrets of the Nineteenth Century and the Fort-
nightly Review^ — sometimes solemnly and seriously,
as when Mr. Morley wrote of " that droning, piteous
chronicle of wrong and cruelty and despair which
everlastingly saddens the compassionating ear like
the moaning of a midnight sea"; sometimes with
odious pretension and self-conceit when smaller men
and foolish women hoot and croak. In the brightest
intellectual circles, many of us have learned to listen
with well-bred calmness to assertions from smiling
gentlemen and beautifully dressed ladies touching
the general wrongness of all things, and the par-

PESSIMISM, ASD ONB OF ITS PBOFESSOBS. 93

ticular wretchedness of human nature, which, did
we believe them, would cause us to rush from the
dinner-table and hang ourselves on the nearest lamp-
post. In Germany, matters have proceeded further ;
and Schopenhauer has been for some time as much
the fashionable Philosopher, as Wagner is the Musi-
cian, of the age.

Of course there are various degrees and kinds of
Pessimism everywhere to be noted. There is the
Philanthropic Pessimist who thinks his fellow-creat-
ures are merely wretched ; and the Misanthropic
Pessimist, who thinks them both wretched and des-
picable. There is the Theistic Pessimist, who still
believes in God, b^t considers Him either to be a
"baflled Ormusd," or else to look down from such
heights on human affairs as to regard them no more
than we do the politics and catastrophes of an ant-
hill. And, finally, there is the Atheistic Pessimist,
who has abandoned the notion of an Intelligence
at the helm of the Universe, and believes only in a
blind Force, irresponsible for all the misery and
crime of which He — or rather It — is the cause.
For all these varied kinds of Pessimism there seem
to be two quite distinct sources, — a good and noble,
and a bad and base one. Each of these sources leads
to results having an outward apparent similarity,
and accordingly creates an illusory resemblance be-

94 PESSIMISM, AND 0KB OF ITS PBOITBSSOBS.

tween the feelings and expressions of persons whose
characters and actions are wide as the poles asunder.
Let me endeavor to discriminate them.

It is, at the first glance, not a little remarkably
that the development of Pessimism to which I have
referred should have taken place in an age of almost
unparalleled public prosperity. Probably Hie suffer-
ings caused by disease, by want, and by injustice, are
now at their minimum in the settled countries of
Europe. And yet it is in our time that men are
now beginning formally to pronounce the evil of the
world to exceed the good, and to treat what their
fathers deemed the "beneficent order of Provi-
dence," as too harsh and unjust a system to be
attributed to a benevolent Deity, or indeed to any
intelligent Being at all. It was not in the days of
old oppression and tyranny, of the great famines or
the "Black Death," that there was any such revolt.
When earth was much more like hell than it is at
present, few men entertained any doubt that there
was a God in heaven. Now that its worst wrongs
are in course of alleviation or remedy, and that
there opens before our eyes a vista of almost illimi-
table progress for our race in happiness and virtue,
the whole stupendous scheme is not unfrequently
pronounced to be nothing better than a huge blunder.

The anomaly is certainly striking, and it may be

PESSIMISM, AND ONE OF ITS PBOI*ESSOBS. 96

carried farther by noting who are those persons
who find the world so bad a place. As it is a pros-
perous age which has developed Pessimism, so it is
almost always prosperous people who are Pessimists.
It is the rarest thing possible to hear any expression
of such ideas from the lips of the suffering or the
dying, or even from those who see their beloved ones
suffer and die. A hundred visits to sordid lodgings
or miserable hovels, to workhouses, jails, hospitals,
asylums for the blind or the incurably diseased, will
scarcely afford us the chance of catching a phrase
indicating that the inmate of the dreary abode
thinks the world awry, and Providence to blame for
it. We must pass to pleasanter scenes, — to the
haunts of the well-paid lecture-frequenting artisan,
— or the houses of the most cultivated and wealthy
of the middle and upper classes, palaces which
calamity has never visited, and where luxurious
food, clothing, furniture, books, flowers, pictures,
music, are accepted as matters of course; and there
we may, not improbably, be told that "none but
bigots who voluntarily close their eyes to the terri-
ble realities of life can dream of calling the world
a happy place, or speak of its design as beneficent."
Sometimes there occurs in the experience of a
single day a contrast, almost ludicrous, between the
patience and gratitude manifested by some poor

96 PESSIMISM, AND ONE OF ITS PBOEESSOBS.

suffering creature — perhaps dying of cancer on a
pauper's pallet — and the expression of revolt and
despair used by a cultivated gentleman who is pos-
sessed of nearly every source of human enjoyment.
All this is not so unmeaning and perverse as it
at first appears. There is a reason why our genera-
tion — the happiest and, we will hope, perhaps, on
the whole, the best the world has yet seen — should
scan the dread problem of Evil with other eyes
than its predecessors; and there are reasons, far
from ignoble, why happy men and women should
find it harder to justify the ways of God to the
miserable than those miserable ones themselves to
do so on their own account. In the first place,
our generation shrinks from the sight of physical
anguish in a way obviously unknown to our pro-
genitors, who could ride gayly on their daily errands
under gallows-trees loaded each with its sickening
weight, or city gates decorated by decapitated
heads; and who could feast and sleep in the
chambers of feudal castles while under their floors
miserable prisoners were pining in dungeons, or
perhaps expiring amid the unutterable horrors of
the oubliette. They could stand by as unmoved
spectators, or throw fresh fagots on the piles
where heretics and witches were burning, and shout
applause when half-hanged traitors were cut down

PESSIMISM, AND ONE OF ITS PR0FESS0B8. 97

from the rope to be drawn and quartered. Oppres-
sions and injustices done by the strong against the
weak were matters of every-day experience in every
town, almost in every parish and household. K
such things seem to us calculated to provoke
vehement indignation and rebellion against every
Power above or below which sanctioned or per-
mitted them, it must be asked who was there in
those days likely to feel any similar indignation?
The laws were not more cruel than the men who
made them, nor the legislators than the mass of
Hie nation. This being the case, how should those
who thought it right and just that their fellows
should endure such tortures find anything myste-
rious in the severest decrees of Providence? The
order of nature — harsh to the eyes of a John
Stuart Mill or a Shelley — must have been mild
enough to those of the habitues of autos-da-f^, or
even let us say to the nobles of France under that
ancien rSgime of which M. Taine has given us the
picture.

Another difference between our age and all
preceding ones, which specially touches this matter,
is that in former times men thought so little of
the lower animals that their lot scarcely entered
as an item into calculation in the purview of the
world. It was always the enigmas presented by

98 PESSIMISM, AND 0KB OE ITS PROFESSORS.

human inequalities, sufferings, and wrongs, which
disturbed the doubter of old. His questions were,
"Why do the wicked flourish like a green bay-tree?
Why do the righteous perish, and none regardeth
it ? Why do the good and useful die in the flower
of their years, and the evil live long in the land?
Why, in short, is not that great justice of heaven
(in which man everywhere intuitively believes,
though his intuition has assuredly never been
evolved by experience), why is this not manifested
in all the concerns of human beings?" The Book
of Job posed the solemn question of this earlier
doubt; and the Book of Revelation, by opening
up to the gaze of men a heaven where the poor
and the persecuted will be forever blessed and
triumphant, afforded it a reply which, if far from
complete, has yet practically sufficed to stay the
faith of Christendom. By the fresh stress which
Christianity laid on the doctrine of Immortality,
and the different relative importance which it
assigned to the earthly and to the heavenly life,
it fulfilled, in a profounder sense, the boast of the
English statesman. It "called up* a New World
to redress the balance of the Old." The orthodox
Catholic doctrine, that sin and suffering are
necessarily permitted by the Creator to allow
scope for moral freedom, may be made in a loose

PmSIMISM, AND OlffE OV ITS PB0FBS80BS. 99

and general way to coyer the larger difficulties
presented by the condition of all moral beings, for
whose woes, if in any case unmerited, compensation
is provided hereafter. So long, then, as the destiny
of our own human race alone occupied any appre-
ciable place in philosophy (and this was down to
the earlier part of this century) there was not
much room for Pessimism to find root among
Western races. As to the brutes, few thought of
their sufferings at all; and those who did so
dismissed them with the doctrine that they shared
the consequences of the Fall, which caused "the
whole creation" to groan and "travail together
in pain."

" These emmets, how little they are in our eyes I
We tread them to dust, and a troop of them dies,
Without our regard or concern,"

as Dr. Watts cheerfully observed of the poor little
insects, even when he was calling us to remark their
wondrous forethought and industry. And larger
animals more nearly akin to us were little more
" regarded " than the ants, till the widening circles of
our sympathies at last began to embrace the higher
races of the brute creation; and their sufferings
then, as a necessary consequence, immediately took
a prominent place among the difficulties of theology.
Geology first gave a shock to the received explana-

100 FESSOnSM, AND ONE OF ITS PBOFESSOBS.

tion of their destiny by proving that animals died
painful deaths seons before "man's first disobedi-
ence " could have taken place, or man himself had
existence on this planet ; and since those, now dis-
tant, days of Dean Buckland's controversies, the
questions so opened out have pressed continually
more upon the thought of humane and religious
men. The faith for which such men yearn in our
day is to be assured —

** That not a moth with vain desire
Is shrivelled In a fruitless fire,
Or but subserves another's gain."

Not one of their grandsires, probably, ever enter-
tained any similar idea, but rather indulged a
sublime contempt of the "poor Indian" whose
'•untutored mind" permitted him to hope that his
dog might share his paradise.

These causes, then, I think, — namely, the growth
of a finer sense of pity for human woes, and the
inclusion of the lower animals in the scope of our
sympathies, — suffice to explain in great measure the
reasons why some of the best of men in our gen-
eration feel the evil and misery of the world, and
display a leaning toward Pessimism unexampled in
harder times.

Nearly all religious men, looking back upon life,
seem disposed to be thankful on their own account^

7BSSIMI8M, ASD ONE OF ITS PBOFBS80B8. 101

and to acknowledge that goodness and mercy have
followed them all the days of their lives. They
have not been " dealt with according to their sins,"
but have many a time been set free from nets of
their own weaving, and helped out of the mire and
clay of vice and passion. Viewed from within^ such
appears to be the common testimony concerning
every good man's career. It is the inexplicable
mysteries in the destinies of their neighbors, as
viewed from outside^ and (as I have just said) the
sufferings of the harmless brutes, which causes such
men now to doubt God and think the world evil.
Satan tempted the old Chaldaean by heaping afflic-
tions on his own person. He tries the modern Job
more cunningly, — by giving him, Asmodeus-fashion,
a wide bird's-eye view of the woes and wrongs of
other people.

To descend from the general proclivities of our
age to those of individuals toward Pessimism, the
same paradox may be observed. As it is by no
means altogether a bad sign of the times that there
is a keener consciousness afloat of the extent to
which pain and wrong prevail in the world, so
neither is it by any means an indication of a bad.
disposition when a man takes a dark view of human
nature and of life. Timon may be a noble fellow,

102 FBB8IMI6M, AND OKB OF ITS FBOnSSCmS.

or very much the reverse. We must study him in
both characters.

The noble Timon has started with an unusual
share of generosity and sympathy, and has become
embittered because he has found other men less
good and true than himself. There is a certain
average sincerity, average unselfishness, average gen-
erosity and gratitude common among men. He who
has a little above the average of such fine qualities
meets on all sides disappointment. He finds people
who display selfishness, where, as a matter of course,
he would have sacrificed his own convenience or
interest to theirs; people who are mean where he
would have been liberal, and suspicious where he
was as open as the day; and, finally, people who
return his kindness with an ingratitude inexplicable
to his generous mind, rich in its own benevolence.
What, then, can happen to our Timon but to begin
to mistrust those whom he finds so unlike him-
self, to shut himself from them (and so, perhaps,
provoke their mistrust in turn), and very commonly
to bestow much of his disappointed affections on
animals, on whose fidelity he finds he can more
surely depend, and whose wrongs at the hands of
cruel men still further deepen his disgust of his own
kind? AU this time, another man, whose generosity
and sincerity were, at starting, a little below rather

PESSIMISM, AND ONE OF ITS PBOFBSSOBS. 103

than above the average, has been passing through
life pleasantly astonished to find that his neighbors
will show him more kindness than (he is conscious)
he would in their places display, and rather more
than less honest than he has reckoned to find them.
Thus, by a curious contradiction, the nobler-natured
man is much more liable than the baser to develop
into the misanthrope; and it is the lofty kind of
scorn and bitterness properly belonging tp him
which every Pessimist assumes, whether he truly
feel it or not. It is always scms entendu^ in all
tirades agaiast human nature, that the speaker is
quite incapable of the weakness, folly, and wicked-
ness he condemns ; and that, if he refers to the " dark
side of Providence," he would have managed the
universe on better principles. But it is extremely
questionable whether we ought to give unlimited
credit to the genuineness of the indignation of those
gentlemen who denounce the evils of the world, but
never stir a finger to remove them ; and whose per-
sonal enjoyment of the good things of life — fine
houses, clothes, dinners, pictures, bric-^brac, pleasant
conversation, and favorable reviews of their books —
has, manifestly, never been clouded by their sombre
sense of the dreadful destiny of mankind at large,
nor their appetite for applause been impaired by
their profound conviction of the folly and contemp-
tibility of the people by whom it is offered.

104 PESSIMISM, AND ONE OF ITS PBOFESSOBS.

A Timon, not at all of the nobler sort, seems to
have been that great light of recent German philos-
ophy, Arthur Schopenhauer. As Schopenhauer died
childless, it will, I hope, hurt the feelings of no one
if we dissect his character candidly as that of the
most prominent Pessimist of the age. It will be
instructive, I think, to learn the "notes" of such a
character, — to study, in short, of what kind of stuff
(so to speak) a Pessimist is occasionally made. In
justice, we must carry in mind that Schopenhauer
accomplished a good deal in the philosophic way,
besides preaching Pessimism. He worked out a
metaphysical system of considerable depth and in-
genuity, — one of the merits of which, at all events,
may be accounted that it is readily applicable to
quite other views than those of its author, respect-
ing the nature and destiny of mankind. With this
formidable system, elaborated in his great work,
Die Welt ah Wille und VorBtellung^ we have, how-
ever (happily for me, and probably for my reader),
for our present purpose, no concern whatever, but
only with his actions and character, such as Miss
Zimmern, condensing the original German memoirs,
sketched in a life-like and transparently truthful
manner in her Life of Schopenhauer.

The first "note" of Schopenhauer's character, I
should say, was his Heartlessness. He seems

PESSIMISM, AND ONE OF ITS PBOFESSOBS. 105

scarcely to have loved anybody — in any sense of
the word worth considering — from his cradle to his
grave. He made, indeed, after his father's death,
much parade of respect for his memory; but his
filial piety, such as it was, stopped short at this
point. He disliked his sprightly, good-natured
mother, and treated her with singular insolence.
As to friendship, he avowed his opinion that " men
of much intellectual worth, more especially if they
have genius, can have but few friends"; and he
verified his own dictum as a first-rate genius by
having, so far as we may judge, no real friends at
aU, though in later life, when he became celebrated,
he had numerous flatterers and disciples. Love was
even less in Schopenhauer's way than friendship,
imless we are to call by the title the passion in its
coarsest form. His opinion was that "the poetry of
love is mainly illusion, a glittering drapery meant
to mantle the solemnity of the thing as it really is "
(p. 222) ; and his actions were quite in accordance
with this crass materialism. He led, his biographer
states, "no saintly ascetic life, nor did he pretend to
this eminence. ... He despised women. ... He was
only different from ordinary men in that he spoke
of what others suppressed ; and his over-zealous dis-
ciples, who saw the* god-like in all his acts, even
dragged these to the light of day." His "careless

106 FESSIMIfiM, AND ONE OF ITS PBOFB8SC«6.

dallying with beauty" (a euphemism, I presume,
for a loose life) but once brought him to wish for
a permanent union. The only woman whom he is
recorded to have desired to marry was an actress,
who, at the time he was "enraptured with her,"
was (fit position for the wife of a great moral phi-
losopher!) the recognized mistress of Duke Carl
August.

It has sometimes happened that men who have
been lacking in those family and friendly affections
which are the most beautiful things in human life
have yet almost atoned for their deficiency by their
fervent " Enthusiasm of Humanity." It is needless
to say that Schopenhauer's character displayed an
impartial negation of both orders of feeling. He
neither loved men nor women in particular, nor man
in general. He carefully defined himself to be not
a misanthrope, only a despiser of men (p. 83). The
higher a man stood mentally, he thought, the lower
must his fellow-men appear. That it was the divine
part of the greatest to serve the least was the very
last suggestion which would have occurred to his
mind. " I read," he observed, " in the face of the
Apollo Belvidere, the just and deep displeasure felt
by the god of the Muses for the wretched obstinacy
of the Philistines"; and, doubtless, Arthur Scho-
penhauer figuratively drew himself up, and felt as

PESSIMISM, AND ONE OP ITS PBOPBSSOES. 107

like the Apollo Belvidere as the corporeal circum-
stances of a German philosopher might permit.

He was "penetrated with the conviction that he
had been placed in a world peopled with beings
morally and intellectually contemptible, from whom
he must keep apart." In his note-book (of rather
a different cast from that of Marcus Aurelius), he
wrote this piece of self-counsel : " Study to acquire
an accurate and connected view of the utter despi-
cability of mankind in general, then of your con-
temporaries, and of German scholars in particular."

The second " note •' in Schopenhauer's character
was his exceeding Cowaedice. The modern Soc-
rates would have deserted Athens at the plague,
and run away at Potidsea. With what poltroonery
he would have behaved, when required to drink
the hemlock, it is impossible to imagine. When his
country was in the throes of war and political crises,
Schopenhauer always carefully moved out of the
way. When there was any kind of infectious
disease prevalent, he fled to another city, so that
half his journeys were mere panic flights. He left
Berlin for fear of the cholera, Naples from alarm of
the small-pox, and Verona because he took it into
his head that his snuff was poisoned. He slept with
loaded pistols close to his hand, and seized them at
the slightest noise. When the postman brought

108 PESSIMISM, AND ONE OF ITS PKOFBSSORS.

him a letter, he started. He used a cup of his own
to avoid the contagion which might lurk in a glass
at a public table. He labelled his valuables with
deceptive names, and wrote his business memoranda
in Greek. As we have seen, he was not bellicose.
Only once in his life is it recorded that he struck a
blow, and that was at a woman. Finding an ac-
(luaintance of his landlady presumptuous enough to
hold a coffee-party in his anteroom, Schopenhauer
knocked her down with such violence that her right
arm was permanently disabled. Any other man,
who had committed an act of similar brutality in
a moment of passion, would probably have hastened
to offer some compensation to his victim; but our
philosopher, on the contrary, hotly contested the
poor woman's suit for legal redress, and quitted the
town in disgust when he found himself compelled to
maintain her for life, — a period which (the non-
sympathetic reader will rejoice to learn) was ex-
tremely prolonged. The writer of an exceedingly
able and thoughtful review of Schopenhauer's phi-
losophy in the Contemporary Review^ some years ago,
observed that his unamiable traits are best excused
by his own candid avowal that he liked his own
mental physiognomy well enough, but his moral not
at all. The unalterableness of the natural character
was one of his favorite dogmas. Certainly, the self-

PESSIMISM, AND ONE OF ITS PBOFBSSOBS. 109

training by which many a naturally nervous temper-
ament has disciplined itself into courage, a selfish
one into generosity, and a morose or peevish temper
into gentleness, was as far as possible from Schopen-
hauer's plan of life; and it opens to us a rather
alarming idea of the society of the future, if his
followers generally should resolve to adopt his facile
principle, and assume that their "natural charac-
ters," whatever they may chance to be, — selfish,
false, dissolute, or cruel, — are " unalterable." Such
liberty, however, is probably reserved for those who
may claim to be " men of genius " like their master,
since he absolved himself from the ordinary duties
incumbent on meaner mortals by the help of a
theory which we may call the Philosopher's Anti-
nomianism. "He weighed his duties toward the
world," we are told, "in the balance with the weight
and intensity of his natural gifts, and he came to
the conclusion that a man gifted with genius, by
merely being and working, sacrifices himself for all
mankind: therefore, he is free from the obligation
of sacrificing himself in particular individually. On
this account, he may ignore claims which others are
bound to fulfil."*

But the third " note " was, I venture to think,
the true key of Schopenhauer's character. It was
Arboganoe. The philosophers whom the world

110 PESSIMISM, AND ONE OF ITS PEOFBSSOBS.

has hitherto honored have been generally noted for
the opposite quality. As saints learn humility by
gazing up at infinite holiness above them, so sages
acquire modesty by looking out on the boundless
ocean of truth, beside which their greatest discov-
eries appear but as the pebbles which the child
gathers by the shore. But the philosophers who are
so good as to enlighten us in these days scarcely
belong to the antiquated type of either a Socrates or
a Newton. The pride and conceit of Arthur Scho-
penhauer, at all events, commenced in boyhood, and
seems to have grown like a snowball till he died of
old age. His mother (described as a woman of
"modest, pleasing manners" and amiable character,
who received habitually in her house such men as
Goethe, the Schlegels, Grimm, and Wieland) depicts
him thus, when a lad yet engaged in collegiate
studies : " Your ill-humor, your complaints of things
inevitable, your sullen looks, the extraordinary opin-
ions you utter like oracles which none may presume
to contradict^ — all this depresses me. Your eternal
quibbles, your laments over the stupid world and
human misery, give me bad nights and unpleasant
dreams."* This little preliminary glance at the
youth of twenty enables us to judge what value
should be attached to the plea urged on his behalf,
that his arrogance and bitterness were but the

TB88IMI8M, AND ONE OF ITS PBOB^SSOQS. Ill

natural results of the neglect with which his great
book was received by an unappreciative public and
a jealous coterie of offended philosophers, the " nec-
essary armor of scorn and self-defence" which
enabled him to hold his ground. The boy at col-
lege, it seems, long before he had written a work to
instruct the world, or had experienced anything but
kindness and prosperity, the healthy, rich, gifted,
and independent young lad, was already habitually
"lamenting over the stupid world and human
misery," and uttering, with " sullen looks," " oracles
which none may presume to contradict."

As he grew older, Schopenhauer learned to
express his good opinion of himself and his works
with serenest equanimity. No more naif expres-
sions of self-complacency have perhaps ever been
penned than this gentleman's eulogiums on his own
productions ; as, for example, when he writes to the
publisher of his work that its "worth and impor-
tance are so great that I do not venture to express it
even toward you, because you could not believe
me," and proceeds to quote a review " which speaks
of me with the highest praise, and says that I am
plainly the greatest philosopher of the age, which is
really saying much less than the good man thinksJ'^
"Sir," he said to an unoffending stranger who
watched Mm across a table d'hdte (where he habit-

112 PESSIMISM, AND ONE OP ITS PROFESSOliS.

ually acted the part of local " lion "), " sir, you are
astonished at my appetite. True, I eat three times
as much as you, but, then, I have three times as much
mind!'^ (p. 159.) The reader who thinks that this
speech could never have been spoken except in jest
and to produce a good-humored laugh has not yet
studied Schopenhauer's saturnine temperament, to
which a joke at his own expense must have been
quite inconceivable. To others, perhaps, such bar-
barous intellectual insolence may seem a pardonable
reaction from the tone of self-depreciation (often
exceedingly insincere) which modern manners have
enforced. But the old classic pride was a very
different thing from Schopenhauer's aggressive arro-
gance, wherewith he managed to blend gross and
egregious vanity in quite a novel combination. On
a les dSfauts de ses qualitSs^ but not usually together
two apparently contradictory defects. In our sim-
plicity, we should have anticipated that the man
who considered himself the greatest philosopher of
his age, and talked about the "loneliness of the
heights" of intellectual grandeur, would have dis-
dained to trouble himself about such miserable
things as common newspaper reviews. We should
have been, however, much mistaken in such a guess.
" Schopenhauer (we are told) began to read German
newspapers, now that they wrote about him. He

PESSIMISM, Amy ONE OP ITS PROPBSSOES. 118

caused the veriest trifle that contained his name to
be sent to him. He looked through all philosophical
works for a mention of himself. His intense con-
tempt for women wavered, when he saw they could
feel interest in his works." What would Aristotle's
" Magnanimous Man " have said to this kind of
littleness? " Honor, from any other person" (than
the good), " or on the score of trifles, he will utterly
despise, and likewise he will despise dishonor." *

Let it be remembered, too, that this was in
Schopenhauer's old age. For a young author to be
nervously excited about the reception of his works
is nothing blameworthy or ridiculous. He is looking
for the confirmation of the yet uncertain whispers
of his own consciousness of ability, or to the extinc-
tion of his hopes. But this exculpation cannot
apply to a man advanced in life and of established
literary reputation, whose opinion of his own exalted
gifts had been fully expanded while he was yet a lad
at college.

Is it too much to say that in this inordinate
opinion of his own powers and merits lies the secret
of this man's Pessimism, of his contempt of other
men, of his discontent with life, of his revolt against
Providence ? It is not wonderful that a man who
looks on his fellows like Apollo Belvidere, slaying
them with the arrows of his scorn, should find them

•EtMc$t BookIV.,obftp.lU.

114 PESSIMISM, AND ONE OF ITS PEOFESSORS.

wretched and unlovable; for no man, however
humble, is ever truly seen by him who looks down
on him, and thus lacks all the insight of love and
sympathy, and all the charity of one who forgives
as he hopes to be forgiven. It is not wonderful that
a man who estimates himself as supremely wise, and
condones his own faults on the score of the unalter-
ableness of natural character, should survey the
world and find it a godless desert. Probably no
human heart ever yet bloomed out into gratitude
even under the brightest sunshine of prosperity,
which had not once been ploughed up by self-
reproach and softened by tears of repentance. In
truth, any kind of religious sense is well-nigh
incompatible with such pride as we are discussing.
The doors whereby other men enter the Temple, —
the tender guidance of human affection, the awful
strife of the higher self against passion and sin, the
sacred moral ambition after yet unattained purity
and goodness, — all these are closed to him. Scho-
penhauer's religious history is a confirmation of the
truth that it is not the marble-palace mind of the
philosopher which God will visit so often as the
humble heart which lies sheltered from the storms of
passion, and all trailed over by the sweet blossoms
of human affections.
It is actually ludicrous to compare this man's

n»BIMISM, AND ONE OF ITS PKOFEBSOBS. 115

intensely selfish, vain, cowardly character with the
magnificent compliments which he paid to virtue in
the abstract, and to the ideal he draws of the perfect
man, or " ascetic," in whom the very sense of indi-
viduality, not to speak of self-regard, is annihilated :
" He will no longer regard himself as a real exist-
ence, comprised within the rigid line of personality,
and thus insulated and differentiated from the rest
of the xmiverse. He will regard his separate being
as a mere transitory phenomenon, a temporary ob-
jectivation of the sole real existence ; and this recog-
nition of his true position must necessarily destroy
selfishness. . . . When a man ceases to draw an ego-
tistic distinction between himself and others, and
takes as much part in their sorrows as in his own,
it naturally follows that such a one, recognizing his
own self in all beings, must regard the endless griefs
of all beings as his own, and thus appropriate to
himself the sorrows of the whole world."* The
modern " Man of Sorrows " (if we may venture on
so irreverent a comparison for the sake of the con-
trast) had, for his own use, an easy method of
"appropriating" the griefs of his kind. "We
gather," says his keen-sighted critic of the Contem-
porary Review^ "from the accounts of his disciples,
that he had arranged for himself an existence more
than tolerable ; for, while free from positive annoy-

116 PESSIMISM, AND ONE OP ITS PBOFBSSOBS.

ance, he found a perfectly consistent and legitimate
source of pleasure in the disinterested contemplation
of the idea of the world's sorrows." * A more easy-
form of martyrdom it is hard to imagine.

Is it not somewhat surprising that a man like this,
who, to do him justice, made no pretence of prac-
tising what he taught, but said openly, with cynical
effrontery, " I preach sanctity, but I am no saint," f
should have exercised any influence over his genera-
tion? We read, however, that "his little band of
disciples grew, and their fanaticism reached a lu-
dicrous point. One entreated him to found a trust
for the purpose of keeping watch that no syllable
of his works should ever be altered; another had
his portrait painted and placed in a room like a
chapel," t etc.

This particular hero-worship is, to my thinking, so
portentous that I have been tempted thus to study
it at some length. For thousands of years, the
human race has gone on adding one noble type to
another in its Pantheon, — the old heathen patriotism
and heroism of a Theseus, a Codrus, a Curtius, a
Regulus, the modest wisdom of a Socrates, and the
stoic grandeur of a Marcus Aurelius. Christianity
added yet saintlier virtues to the ideal, — the charity,
the purity, the religious fervor, and martyr devotion
of a whole army of saints. Yet all these " stars of

• Contmnparary JiwieWf February, 1873, t Wt P* IW* t ^4^ P* ML

PESSIMISM, AND ONE OP ITS PBOFESSORS. 117

our mortal night" can, it seems, be obsctired and
forgotten; and men who might have known and
honored and followed them, like the Magi of old,
prefer to dance after such a flaring link-light as
Schopenhauer lifted over his own head ! Observing
this, and how his desolate doctrine is gaining ground,
and recognizing not a few of his personal charac-
teristics (more especially his arrogance) among other
thinkers nearer home, we are tempted to turn back
fondly and regretfully to the humblest old-fashioned
goodness. Many of us had confidently trusted that,
when knowledge increased, wisdom and love would
grow along with it ; that, without losing the sacred
lessons of the past, mankind would obtain still deeper
insight into moral truth, and that phases of char-
acter would appear more beautiful, more joyous,
more perfectly rounded in all the gifts and graces
of humanity than the world yet has seen, — the long-
severed virtues of the hero and the saint combined
at last.

Alas I if Schopenhauers are to increase and mul-
tiply among us, these hopes have been visionary,
indeed ! As his character emerges from his biogra-
phy, and stands clearly revealed to sight, memories
of many a man and woman of small account in the
world rise up and range themselves in our thoughts
for comparison opposite to this great philosopher.

118 PBSSIMISIVI, AND OKE OF ITS PROB'ESSORS.

We remember those who, instead of flying from the
terrors of pestilence or war, have freely gone to
meet them at the call of benevolence or patriotism.
We remember those who, instead of finding their
fellow-men "despicable," have been lifelong loving
friends, faithful and tender husbands, devoted
parents and children, ardent philanthropists, sacrific-
ing wealth and health and every enjoyment that
they might relieve and bless the most miserable of
mankind, — the criminal, the diseased, the vicious,
and abandoned. We remember those who, instead
of resting self-satisfied with the " unalterableness "
of their own moral defects, have striven day and
night, like the Pilgrim fighting on his knees against
Apollyon, to purify their hearts of every stain, and,
instead of arraigning Providence because their
merits were insufl&ciently rewarded, have blessed
God most of all for their afflictions. We remember
all these, and also we remember the glory of peace
and patience on their pain-worn faces ; and from the
depths of ^ our souls comes the verdict that the
dullest "Philistine" of them all was, in the scale
of true nobleness, worth a thousand pessimist phi-
losophers.

Schopenhauer was, in truth, the best illustration
which could be found of the fallacy of the modern
intellect-worship, the idolatry of mere mental force,

PESSIMISM, AND ONE OF ITS PROFESSOBS. 119

whicli is scarcely less stupid and ignoble than the
idolatry of the physical force of winds or waters.
As baseness is more contemptible in a king, and
miserliness in a millionnaire, so are all moral faul^.s
and littlenesses only more despicable when set oii
the pedestal of genius. There are minds — and
Schopenhauer's was one of them — whose brilliancy
is that of a light-house. Its best use is to disclose
the cold and troubled sea, and the dreary rocks
whereon the unwary might make shipwreck.

The question, "How far is Pessimism true^ and
how far does the actual state of the world justify
us in pronouncing life to be an evil?" is far too
vast and too solemn to be treated in this brief paper.
One remark only must be made in abatement of the
wide-sweeping denunciations of the present order of
things in which Pessimists habitually indulge. If
we take count of their arguments, we shall find that
at least one-third are built on the assumption (which
nothing in genuine philosophy warrants) that the
" hypothesis of a God " involves the attribution to
him not only of supreme but of absolute power, and
generally of a power which includes self-contradic-
tions. We should sweep away no inconsiderable
number of difficulties, if we could get fairly out of
reach of this ever-recurring fallacy, and hear no

120 PESSIMISM, AND ONB OF ITS PBOFBSSOBS.

more that God ought to make every creature abso-
lutely happy, and also absolutely virtuous; and
illume the martyr's glory, while invariably extin-
guishing the martyr's pile. And, again, another
third of the arguments of Pessimists rests on the
yet more egregious and fundamental mistake that
suffering is always to be accounted an evil, and may
be lawfully weighed by them as such in holding the
scales of the world. The truth that it is "good to
have been afflicted," that out of pain and grief and
disappointment arise the purest virtues, the tenderest
sympathies, the loftiest courage, the divinest faith, —
this thrice-blessed truth, the very alphabet of spir-
itual experience, is, as a rule, quite overlooked by
great philosophers of the order of Schopenhauer.

When all corrections and deductions are made, a
residue of profound, awful, inexplicable misery —
misery of sinful man and misery of sinless brutes —
remains, alas! to form, doubtless, in time to come,
as in the ages which are past, the dread " Riddle of
the painful Earth." We must expect it to press
upon us ever more and more in proportion as our
sense of justice and love rises higher, and our sym-
pathies with unmerited suffering grow more acute.
Whether the shadow which that mystery casts on
religion will hereafter be in any degree relieved by
fresh lights obtained through sounder theories of

PESSIMISM, AND ONB OF ITS PBOFBSSORS. 121

Nature, it were idle to guess. One thing seems
clear enough; namely, that the spirit wherewith
some modem Pessimists approach the tremendous
problem is one which can never lead to its solution,
and which in itself is calculated to form no incon-
siderable addition to the gloom of human existence.
The world, to all who enter it, is very much what
their anticipations make of it, — full of matter for
joy and gratitude, or for repining and discontent.
It appears beautiful or dreary, according as they
regard it through the cloudless, childlike eyes of
cheerful trust or through the dim and distorting
spectacles of doubt and despair. No generation so
miserable has yet seen the light as one which should
be trained to expect neither justice nor love from
God, and to "cultivate a connected view of the
general despicability of mankind."

After all, as Schopenhauer himself confessed
(though he cared so little to practise the lesson),
chaiacter — or, as Mr. Matthew Arnold would say,
conduct — is the great matter to which all theories
are subordinate. "Moral goodness belongs to an
order of things which is above this life, and is in-
commensurable with any other perfection." There
is a certain value in the old test whereby a tree is
known by its fruits. To such of us as have kept
any foundations of faith still standing, the pre-

122 PESSIMISM, AKD ONE OF ITS PBOFESSOBS.

sumption is surely enormous that the intellectual
system which naturally produces courage, trustful-
ness, and loving-kindness, must be nearer to the
Eternal Verities than the blighting theory which
brings forth such thorns and thistles as deformed
the character of the great Pessimist Philosopher of
the nineteenth century.

ZOOPHILY.

ZOOPHILY.

It is a comforting reflection in a world still "faU
of violence and cruel habitations " that the behavior
of men to domestic animals must have been, on the
whole, more kind than the reverse. Had it been
otherwise, the " set " of the brute's brains, according
to modern theory,%'ould have been that of shyness
and dread of us, such as is actually exhibited by the
rabbit which we chase in the field and the rat we
pursue in the cupboard. In countries where cats
are exceptionally ill-treated (e.^r., the south of
France), poor puss is almost as timid as a hare;
while the devotion and trustfulness of the dog
toward man in every land peopled by an Aryan
race seem to prove that, with all our faults, he has
not found us such bad masters after all. Dogs love
us, and could only love us, because we have be-
stowed on them some crumbs of love and good-will,
though their generous little hearts have repaid the
debt a thousand-fold. The "Shepherd's Chief
Mourner " and " Grey Friar's Bobby " had probably

126 ZOOPHELY.

received in their time only a few pats from the
homy hands of their masters, and a gruff word of
approval when the sheep had been particularly
cleverly folded. But they recognized that the su-
perior being condescended to care for them, and
their adoring fidelity was the ready response.*

Two different motives of course have influenced
men to such kindness to domestic animals, one being
obvious self-interest, and the necessity, if they
needed the creature's services, to keep it in some
degree of health and comfort; and the other being
the special affection of individual men for favorite
animals. Of the frequent manifestation of this
latter sentiment in all ages, literature and art bear
repeated testimony. We find it in the parable of
Nathan; in the pictured tame lion rxmning beside
the chariot of Barneses; in the story of Argus in the
Ody%8ey; in the episode in the Mahabharata^ where
the hero refuses to ascend to heaven in the car of
Indra without his dog; in the exquisite passage in
the Zend-Avesta^ where the lord of good speaks to
Zoroaster, "For I have made the dog, I who am

*A toaching story of such sheep-gathering was recently told me on
good authority. A shepherd lost his large flock on the Scotch mountains
in a fog. After fruitless search, he returned to his cottage, bidding his
collie find the sheep, if she could. The collie, who was near giving birth
to her young, understood his orders, and disappeared in the mist, not
returning Xor many hours. At last, she came home in miserable plight,

soophhiY. 127

Ahura Mazda"; in the history of Alexander's hero,
Bucephalus; in Pliny's charming tales of the boy
and the pet dolphin, and of the poor slave thrown
down the Gemonian stairs, beside whose corpse his
dog watched and wailed till even the stern hearts of
the Roman populace were melted to pity.

But neither the every-day self-interested care of
animals by their masters, nor the occasional genuine
affection of special men to favorite animals, — which
have together produced the actual tameness most of
the domesticated tribes now exhibit, — seems to have
led men to the acknowledgment of moral obligation
on their part toward the brutes. As a lady will
finger lovingly a bunch of flowers, and the next
moment drop it carelessly on the roadside or pluck
the blossoms to pieces in sheer thoughtlessness, so
the great majority of mankind have always treated
animals.

** We tread them to death, and a troop of them dies
Without our regard or concern,"

cheerfully remarked Dr. Watts concerning ants;
but he might have said the same of our "uncon-

driTlng before her the last stray sheep, and carrying in her mouth a puppy
of her own I She had of necessity left the rest of her litter to perish on
the hillF and in the intervals of their birth the poor beast had performed
her tasl and driven home the sheep. Her last puppy only she had con-
trired to save.

128 ZOOPHILY.

cem'' in the case of the cruel destruction of thou-
sands of harmless birds and beasts and the starvation
of their young, and of the aU but universal reck-
lessness of men in dealing with creatures not rep-
resenting value in money.

It is not, however, to be reckoned as surprising
that our forefathers did not dream of such a thing
as duty to animals. They learned very slowly that
they owed duties to men of other races than their
own. Only on the generation which recognized
thoroughly for the first time (thanks in great meas-
ure to Wilberforce and Clarkson) that the negro
was " a man and a brother " did it dawn that, be-
yond the negro, there were other stiU humbler
claimants for benevolence and justice. Within a
few years passed both the emancipation of the West
Indian slaves and that first act for prevention of
cruelty to animals of which Lord Erskine so truly
prophesied that it would prove, " not only an honor
to the Parliament of England, but an era in the
civilization of the world."

But the noble law of England — which thus fore-
stalled the moralists and set an example which every
civilized nation, with one solitary exception, has fol-
lowed — remains even to this day, after sixty years,
still in advance of the systematic teachers of human
duty. Even while every year sermons specially in-

ZOOFHILY. 129

culcating humanity to animals are preached all over
the kingdom, nobody (so far as the present writer
is aware) has attempted formally to include Duty
to the Lower Animals in any complete system of
ethics as an organic part of the Whole Duty of
Man.*

Without pretending for a moment to fill up this
gap in ethics, I would fain offer to those who are
interested in the subject a suggestion which may
possibly serve as a scaffolding till the solid edifice
be built by stronger hands. We must perchance yet
wait to determine what are the right actions of man
to brute; but I do not think we need lose much
time in deciding what must be the right sentiment^
the general feeling wherewith it is fit we should
regard the lower animals. If we can but clearly
define that sentiment, it will indicate roughly the
actions which will be consonant therewith.

In the first place, it seems to me that a sense
of serious responsibility toward the brutes ought to
replace our "lady-and-the-nosegay " condition of in-

*The best effort to supply the missing chapter of ethics is the charm-
ing and eloquent Yolame, IHghta of an Animal, by E. B. Nicholson. I
thankfully recognize the candor wherewith the author has tackled the
difficult problems of the case, and the value of his demonstration that the
law of England assumes the fundamental principle that cruelty to an
animal is an offence per ee, and that it is not necessary to show that it
injures any human owner or spectator. In this respect, as in all others,

180 sooPHHiT.

satieianee. The *^ages before morality" are at an
end at last, even in this remote province of human
freedom. Of all the grotesque ideas which have
imposed on us in the solemn phraseology of divines
and moralists, none is more absurd than the doc-
trine that our moral obligations stop short where the
object of them does not happen to know them, and
assures us that, because the brutes cannot call us
to account for our transgressions, nothing that we
can do will constitute a transgression. To absolve
us from paying for a pair of boots because our boot-
maker's ledger had unluckily been burned would be
altogether a parallel lesson in morality. It is plain
enough, indeed, that the creature who is (as we
assume) without a conscience or moral arbitrament
must always be exonerated from guilt, no matter
what it may do of hurt or evil; and the judicial
proceedings against, and executions of, oxen and
pigs in the Middle Ages for manslaughter were un-
speakably absurd. But not less absurd, on the other
side, is it to exonerate men, who have consciences
and free will, when they are guilty of cruelty to

our Act (11 and 12 Vict. c. 39) immeasurably transcends the French Xoi
Grammont, which condemns only cruelty exhibited in public places and
painful to the spectators. Mr. Nicholson justifies viyisection only so far
as it can be rendered absolutely painless by anaesthetics. To such of us as
haye seen through that delusion, eadU quaettUK

brutes, on the plea not that they, but the brutes are
immoral and irresponsible.*

A moral being is not moral on one side of him
only, but moral all round, and toward all who are
above, beside, and beneath him : just as a gentleman
is a gentleman not only to the king, but to the peas-
ant; and as a truthful man speaks truth to friend
and stranger. Just in the same way, the " merciful
man is merciful to his beast," as he is merciful to
the beggar at his gate. I may add that every noble
quality is specially tested by its exhibition in those
humbler directions wherein there is nothing to be
gained by showing it and nothing to be lost by con-
trary behavior.

There is a passage from Jeremy Bentham, quoted
in Mrs. Jamieson's Commonplace Book and else-
where, which will recur to many readers at this
point: "The day may come," he says, "when the
rest of the animal creation may acquire those rights
which never could have been withheld from them
but by the hand of tyranny. It may come one day
to be recognized that the number of legs, the
villosity of the skin, or the termination of the 08

* As a recent example of this doctrine, see an article in the Fortnightly
Review for Feb. 1, 1882. " Is it not," the author says, " the very basis of
ethical doctrine (!) that the moral rights of any being depend on its ethical
nature? "

132 ZOOPHILY.

sacrum^ are reasons insufficient for abandoning a
sensitive being to the caprice of a tormentor. . . .
The question is not, Can they reason? or Can they
speak? but, Can they suflFer ? "

Long before Bentham, a greater mind, travelling
along a nobler road of philosophy, laid down the
canon which resolves the whole question. Bishop
Butler affirmed that it was on the simple fact of a
creature being sentient — i.e., capable of pain and
pleasure — that rests our responsibility to save it
pain and give it pleasure. There is no evading this
obligation, then, as regards the lower animals, by the
plea that they are not moral beings. It is our
morality, not theirs^ which is in question. There are
special considerations which in different cases may
modify our obligation, but it is on such special
reasons, not on the universal non-moral nature of
the brutes (as the old divines taught), that our exon-
eration must be founded ; and the onus lies on us to
show cause for each of them.

The distinction between our duties to animals and
our duties to our human fellow-creatures lies here.
As regards them both, we are indeed forbidden to
inflict avoidable pain, because both alike are sentient.
But, as regards the brutes, our duties %top there:
whereas, as regards men, they being moral as well as
sentient beings, our primary obligations toward them

ZOOPHILY. 188

must concern their higher natures, and include the
preservation of the lives which those higher natures
invest with a sanctity exclusively their own. Thus,
we reach the important conclusion that the infliction
of avoidable pain is the supreme offence as regards
the lower animals, but not the supreme offence as
regards man. Sir Henry Taylor's noble lines go to
the very root of the question : —

** Pain, terror, mortal agonies, which scare
Thy heart in man, to brutes thou wilt not spare.
Are theirs less sad and real ? Pain in man
Bears the high mission of theflaU and fan ;
In brutes f His purely piteous.**

Pain is the one supreme evil of the existence of
the lower animals, an evil which (so far as we can
see) has no countervailing good. As to death, a
painless one — so far from being the supreme evil to
them — is often the truest mercy. Thus, instead of
the favorite phrase of certain physiologists, that
" they would put hecatombs of brutes to torture to
save the smallest pain of a man," true ethics bids us
regard man's moral welfare only as of supreme im-
portance, and anything which can injure it (such,
for example, as the practice, or sanction of the
practice, of cruelty) as the worst of evils, even if
along with it should come a mitigation of bodily
pain. On this subject, the present Bishop of Win-

184 ZOOPSILT.

Chester has put the case in a nutshell. " It is true,"
he said, " that man is superior to the beast, but the
part of man which we recognize as such is his moral
and spiritual nature. So far as his body and its
pains are concerned, there is no particular reason
for considering them more than the body and bodily
pains of a brute."

Of course, the ground is cut from under us in
this whole line of argument by those ingenious
thinkers who have recently disinterred (with such
ill-omened timeliness for the vivisection debate)
Descartes' supposed doctrine, that the appearance
of pain and pleasure in the brutes is a mere delu-
sion, and that they are only automata, — "a superior
kind of marionettes, which eat without pleasure, cry
without pain, desire nothing, know nothing, and
only simulate intelligence as a bee simulates a mathe-
matician." If this conclusion, on which modern
science is to be congratulated, be accepted, it fol-
lows, of course, that we should give no more consid-
eration to the fatigue of a noble hunter than to the
creaking wood of a rocking-horse; and that the
emotions a child bestows on its doll will be more
serious than those we bestow on a dog who dies of
grief on his master's grave. Should it appear to
us, however, on the contrary (as it certainly does
to me), that there is quite as good evidence that

ZOOPHOiT. 185

dogs and elephants reason as that certain physiol-
ogists reason, and a great deal better evidence that
they — the animals — feel, we may perhaps dismiss
the Cartesianism of the nineteenth century, and
proceed without further delay to endeavor to define
more particularly the fitting sentiment of man to
sentient brutes. We have seen we ought to start
with a distinct sense of some degree of moral respon-
sibility as regards them. What shape should that
sense assume ?

We have been in the habit of indulging ourselves
in all manner of antipathies to special animals, some
of them having, perhaps, their source and raiaon
cTStre in the days of our remote but not illustrious
ancestors,

** When wild in woods the noble savage ran " ;

or those of a still earlier date, who were, as Mr.
Darwin says, " arboreal in their habits," ere yet we
had deserved the reproach of having "made our-
selves tailless and hairless and multiplied folds to
our brain." Other prejudices, again, are mere per.
sonal whims, three-fourths of them being pure affec-
tation. A man will decline to sit in a room with an
inoffensive cat, and a lady screams at the sight of a
mouse, which is infinitely more distressed at the
rencontre than she. I have known an individual,
otherwise distinguished for audacity, " make tracks "

186 ZOOFHILY.

across several fields to avoid a placidly ruminating
cow. In our present stage of civilization, these silly
prejudices are barbarisms and anachronisms, if not
vulgarisms, and should be treated like exhibitions of
ignorance or childishness. For our remote progeni-
tors before mentioned, tusky and hirsute, struggling
for existence with the cave bear and the mammoth
in the howling wilderness of a yet uncultured world,
there was no doubt justification for regarding the
terrible beasts around them with the hatred which
comes of fear. But the animal creation, at least
throughout Europe, has been subdued for ages ; and
all its tribes are merely dwellers by sufferance in a
vanquished province. Their position as regards us
appeals to every spark of generosity alight in our
bosoms, and ought to make us ashamed of our
whims and antipathies toward beings so humble.
Shall man arrogate the title of "lord of creation,"
and not show himself, at the least, ban prince to
his poor subjects? It is not too much to ask that,
even toward wild animals, our feelings should be
those of royal clemency and indulgence, — of pleas-
ure in the beauty and grace of such of them as are
beautiful; of admiration for their numberless won-
drous instincts; of sympathy with their delight in
the joys of the forest and the fields of air. Few, I
suppose, of men with any impressionability can

ZOOPHILY. 187

watch a lark ascending into the sky of a summer's
morning without some dim echo of the feelings
which inspired Shelley's Ode. This is, however,
only a specially vivid instance of a sympathy which
might be almost universal, and which, so far as we
learn to feel it, touches all nature for us with a
magic wand.

If we are compelled to fight with them, if they
are our natural enemies and can never be anything
else, then let us wage war upon them in loyal sort,
as we contended against the Russians at Balaklava ;
and, if we catch any prisoners, deal with them chiv-
alrously or at least mercifully. This, indeed (to do
justice to sportsmen, much as I dislike their pur-
suit), I have always observed to be the spirit of the
old-fashioned country gentleman, before the gross
slaughtering of battues and despicable pigeon-
matches were heard of in the land.

As to domestic animals, their demands on us, did
we read them aright, are not so much those of peti-
tioners for mercy as of rightful claimants of justice.
We have caused their existence, and are responsible
that they should be on the whole happy and not
miserable. We take their services to carry our bur-
dens, to enhance our pleasures, to guard our homes
and our flocks. In the case of many of them, we
accept the fondest fidelity and an affection such as

188 ZOOPHILY.

human beings scarcely give once in a lifetime.
They watch for ns, work for us, bear often weary
imprisonment and slavery in our service, and not
seldom mourn for us with breaking hearts when we
die. If we conceive of an arbiter sitting by and
watching alike our behavior and the poor brutes' toil
and love, can we suppose he would treat it as merely
a piece of generosity on our part, which we were
free to leave unfulfilled witliout blame, that we
should behave considerately to such an humble
friend, supply him with food, water, and shelter, for-
bear to overwork him, and end his harmless life at
last with the least possible pain? Would he not
demand it of us as the simplest matter of justice ? *
For those who accept the Darwinian theory, and
believe that the relationship between man and the
brutes is not only one of similarity, but of actual
kinship in blood, it would have seemed only natural
that this new view should have brought forth a burst
of fresh sympathy and tenderness. If our physical
frames, with all their quivering nerves and suscepti-
bilities to a thousand pains, be, indeed, only the

*I have endeavored elsewhere to work ont this hypothesis of an
umpire between man and brute, as a method of helping us to a solution
of the problem of what are and what are not lawful actions on our parts
toward animals. The reader who may be interested in the inquiry may
obtain my pamphlet, The Right of Tormentingf price 2d., at the office of
the Society for the Protection of Animals from Viyisection, 1 Victoria
Street, Westminster.

zowMWz. 189

four-footed creature's body a little modified by de-
velopment ; if our minds only overlap and transcend
theirs, but are grown out of those humbler brains ;
if all our moral qualities, our love and faith and
sense of justice, be only their affection and fidelity
and dim sense of wrong extended into wider realms,
— then we bear in ourselves the irresistible testi-
mony to their claims on our sympathy. And if^
like so many of the disciples of the same new phi-
losophy, we are unhappy enough to believe that both
man and brute when laid in the grave awake no
more, then, above all, it would seem that this com-
mon lot of a few pleasures and many pains, to be
followed by annihilation, would move any heart to
compassion. In the great, silent, hollow universe
in which these souls believe themselves to stand,
how base does it seem to turn on the weaker, un-
offending beings around them, and spoil their little
gleam of life and joy under the sun !

Nothing is more startling to me than the fact that
some of the leading apostles of this philosophy, and
even its respected author himself, should in one and
the same breath tell us that an ape, for example, is
actually our own flesh and blood, and that it is
right and proper to treat apes after the fashion of
Professors Munk and Goltz and Ferrier. These
gentlemen, as regards the poor quadrumana^ are

140 ZOOPHILY.

rather "more than kin,'' and rather "less than
kind."

For those who, whether they believe in evolution
or not, still hold faith in the existence of a divine
Lord of man and brute, the reasons for sympar
thy are, in another way, still stronger. That the
Christian religion did not, from the first, like the
Zoroastrian, Buddhist, and Brahminist, impress its
followers with the duty of mercy to the brutes ; that
it was left to a few tender-hearted saints, like St.
Francis, to connect the creatures in • any way with
the worship of the Creator, and to the later devel-
opment of Protestantism to formulate any doctrine
on the subject of duty toward them, — is a paradox
which would need much space to explain. Modern
religion, at all events, by whatever name it is called,
seems tending more and more to throw an addi-
tional tender sacredness over our relations to the
"unoffending creatures which he," their Maker,
"loves," and to make us recognize a latent truth in
the curiously hackneyed lines of Coleridge concern-
ing him who "prayeth best" and also loveth best
"both man and bird and beast." Where that great
and far-reaching softener of hearts, the sense of our
own failures and offences, is vividly present, the
position we hold to creatures who have never done
wrong is always found inexpressibly touching. To

ZOOPHILT. 141

be kind to them and rejoice in their happiness seems
just one of the few ways in which we can act a god-
like part in our little sphere, and display the mercy
for which we hope in our turn. Whichever way we
take it, I conceive we reach the same conclusion.
The only befitting feeling for human beings to en-
tertain toward brutes is, as the very word suggests,
the feeling of humanity : or, as we may interpret it,
the sentiment of sympathy, so far as we can culti-
vate fellow-feeling ; of pity, so far as we know them
to suflFer; of mercy, so far as we can spare their
sufferings ; of kindness and benevolence, so far as it
is in our power to make them happy.

There is nothing fanatical about this humanity.
It does not call on us to renounce any of the useful
or needful avocations of life as regards animals, but
rather would it make the man imbued with it per-
form them all the better.* We assuredly need not,
because we become humane, sacrifice the higher life
for the lower, as in the wondrous Buddhist parable
so beautifully rendered in the Light of Asia^ where
"Lord Buddha," in one of his million lives, gives

•In fact, many men who pursue such tradeSi notably butchers, are
genuinely humane, and do their best to get through their work in the
most merciful way. Several of them have recently expressed warm satis-
faction on obtaining Baxter's mask, whereby oxen may be instantaneously
killed without the chance of a misdirected blow. The mask is to be
obtained from Mr. Baxter, Ealing Dean, W.

142 ZOOPHILY.

himselfi out of pity, to be devoured by a famishing
tiger who cannot feed her cuba, and

"The great cat's burning breath
Mixed with the last sigh of such fearless love."

We need not even copy the sweet lady in the
"Sensitive Plant" who made the bees and moths
and ephemeridsB her attendants: —

" But all killing insects and gnawing worms,
And things of obscene and unlovely forms,
She bore in a basket of Indian woof
Into the rough woods far aloof, —

'' In a basket of grasses and wild flowers full,
The freshest her gentle hands could pull
For the i>oor banished insects, whose intent.
Although they did ill, was innocent."

This is poetry not meant for practice, and yet
even these hyperboles carry a breath as of Eden
along with them. Of Eden did I say ? Nay, rather
of the later Paradise for which the soul of the
greatest of the prophets yearned, where " they shall
not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain."

I will not attempt here to define how the senti-
ment of humanity to the brutes, thoroughly in-
grained into a man's heart, would make him decide
the question of field sports. My own impression
is that it would lead him to abandon first, and with

ZOOPHILY. 143

utter disgust, such wretched amusements as pigeon-
matches and battues of half-tame pheasants; and,
later, those sports in which, as in fox-hunting and
coursing and duck-shooting, the sympathy of the
sportsman with his hounds and horse, or his grey-
hound or retriever, is uppermost in his mind, to the
exclusion of the wild and scarcely seen object of
his pursuit. In nine kinds of such sports, I believe,
out of ten, it is rather a case of ill-divided sympathy
for animals than of lack of it which inspires the
sportsman; and not many would find enjoyment
where neither horse nor dog had part, — like poor
Robertson, of Brighton, sitting for hours in a tub
in a marsh to shoot wild duck, and counting the
period so spent as " hours of delight ! "

But there is one practice respecting which the
influence of such a sentiment of humanity as we
have supposed must have an unmistakable result.
It must put an absolute stop to vivisection. To
accustom ourselves and our children to regard ani-
mals with sympathy ; to beware of giving them pain,
and rejoice when it is possible for us to give them
pleasure; to study their marvellous instincts, and
trace the dawnings of reason in their sagacious acts ;
to accept their services and their affection, and give
them in return such pledges of protection as our
kind words and caresses, — to do this, and then

144 ZOOPHILY.

calmly consent to hand them over to be dissected
alive, this is too monstrous to be borne. De deux
chases Vune. Either we must cherish animals — and
then we must abolish vivisection — or we must
sanction vivisection; and then, for very shame's
sake, and lest we poison the springs of pity and
sympathy in our breasts and the breasts of our chil-
dren, we must renounce the ghastly farce of petting
or protecting animals, and pretending to recognize
their noble and lovable qualities. If love and cour-
age and fidelity, lodged in the heart of a dog, have
no claim on us to prevent us from dissecting that
heart even while yet it beats with affection ; if the
human-like intelligence working in a monkey's brain
do not forbid (but rather invite) us to mutilate that
brain, morsel by morsel, till the last glimmering of
mind and playfulness die out in dulness and death, —
if this be so, then, in Heaven's name, let us at least
have done with our cant of " humanity," and abolish
our Acts of Parliament, and dissolve our Bands of
Mercy, and our three hundred Societies for the Pre-
vention of Cruelty throughout the world.

The idea of vivisection (to use the phrase of its
two thousand advocates who memorialized Sir
Richard Cross) rests on the conception of an ani-
mal (a dog, for example) as " a carnivorous creature,
valuable for purposes of research," — a mechanism.

ZOOPHTLY. 146

in short, of nerves and muscles, bones and arteries,
which, as they added, it would be a pity to " with-
draw from investigation." The crass materialism
which thus regards such a creature as a dog (and
would, doubtless, if its followers spoke out, be found
similarly to regard a man) is at the opposite pole of
thought and feeling from the recognition of the
animal in its higher nature as an object of our ten-
derness and sympathy. We cannot hold both views
at once. If we take the higher one, the lower must
become abhorrent in our eyes. There is, there
ought to be, no question in the matter of a little
more or a little less of torture, or of dispute whether
anaesthetics, when they can be employed, usually
effect complete and final or only partial and tem-
porary insensibility; or of whether such processes
as putting an animal into a stove over a fire till it
expires in ten or twenty minutes ought to be called
"baking it alive," or described by some less dis-
tressing and homely phraseology. It is the simple
idea of dealing with a living, conscious, sensitive,
and intelligent creature as if it were dead and
senseless matter against which the whole spirit of
true humanity revolts. It is the notion of such
absolute despotism as shall justify not merely taking
life, but converting the entire existence of the
animal into a misfortune, which we denounce as a

146 ZOOPHILT.

brutal misconception of the relations between the
higher and the lower creatures, and an utter anach-
ronism in the present stage of human moral feeling.
A hundred years ago, had physiologists frankly
avowed that they recognized no claims on the part
of the brutes which should stop them from torturing
them, they would have been only on the level of
their contemporaries. But to-day they are behind
the age ; ay, sixty years behind the legislature and
the poor Irish gentleman who "ruled the houseless
wilds of Connemara," and had the glory of giving
his name to Martin's Act. How their claim for a
"free vivisecting table" may be looked back upon
a century to come, we may perhaps foretell with no
great chance of error. In his last book, published
ten years ago, Sir Arthur Helps wrote these mem-
orable words : " It appears to me that the advance-
ment of the world is to be measured by the increase
of humanity and the decrease of cruelty. ... I am
convinced that, if an historian were to sum the gains
and losses of the world at the close of each recorded
century, there might be much which was retrograde
in other aspects of human life and conduct, but
nothing could show a backward course in humanity "
(pp. 195, 196). As I have said ere now, the battle

of mercy, like that of freedom

" Once began,
Though often lost, is always won."

200PHILY, 147

Even should all the scientific men in Europe unite
in a resolution that " vivisection is necessary," just
as all the Dominicans would have united three
hundred years ago to resolve that autos-da-f^ were
"necessary," or as all the lawyers and magistrates
that the peine forte et dure was " necessary," or as
the statesmen of America did thirty years ago that
negro slavery was " necessary," yet the " necessity "
will disappear in the case of the scientific torture of
animals as in all the rest. The days of vivisection
are numbered.

SACEMCIAL MEDICINE.

SACRIFICIAL MEDICINE.

The world has done wrong to laugh at the old
lady who reproved her sailor grandson for " telling
her such a scandalous fib as that he had seen a fish
fly in the air," but restored her confidence to the
hopeful youth when he proceeded to narrate how he
had picked up a wheel of Pharaoh's chariot on the
Red Sea shore. Practically, we all jump easily at
beliefs toward the level of which we have already
climbed by previous knowledge (or previous preju-
dice, as it may chance), and refuse, donkey-wise, to
budge an inch toward those which happen to be on
a plane above our preconceived notions of what
either is or ought to be. It is this propensity, of
course, which makes the most baseless calumny mis-
chievous by paving the way for the next slander
against its object. And it is it, also, which grants
interminable leases of life to false systems of physics
and religion by securing a welcome for every fiction
and fallacy which at any time may seem to favor

152 SACBIFIGIAL MEDICINE.

them, and closing the door in the fiEtce of truths
which militate against and might explode them.

A curious study of the " Grammar of Assent," as
used by the majority of mankind in the matter
which comes nearest to their own business and
bosoms, might, I think, be made by unearthing the
preconceived notions and preparatory ideas which
must needs exist as regards the healing art, and
which can have enabled doctors confidently to pre-
scribe, and patients meekly to accept, the horrid
and shocking remedies in use from the earliest
period, — remedies of which it is a mild criticism to
say that they were worse than the diseases they
professed to cure. Had the minds of men con-
cerned with medical inquiries been really free from
antecedent convictions, — blank sheets of paper
whereon Nature could have written down her facts,
which experience might have read and collated, —
it is clear enough that good diet, exercise, and
cleanliness, and the occasional use of simple prep-
arations of herbs, would early have constituted the
primitive and sound rules of medical science, to be
supplemented, as time went on, by discoveries of the
therapeutic value of more rare vegetable substances
and of a few minerals. Never could practical ob-
servation, by any possibility, have suggested that it
would be beneficial to a sick man to make him

BACniFlClAIj MEDICINB. 153

swallow potable gold or powdered skulls, or a bolus
of decomposed old toads and earth-worms. The
WW-" scientific use of the imagination " can alone
have dictated these and scores of no less absurd and
obnoxious prescriptions, prompted by some a priori
theory of what oughty antecedently to experience, to
be suitable for the cure of disease, and " in accord-
ance with the eternal fitness of things."

What, then, were the notions in obedience to
which these marvellous remedies were ordained ? If
we exclude from present consideration all the really
useful therapeutic agents, discovered doubtless by
genuine experience and recorded by the ancient
physicians, Galen and Hippocrates, Dioscorides and
Avicenna, and all the rest, and also set aside those
which, though not really useful, might have been
readily mistaken for being so by imperfect early
observation, we find the immense residue of absurd
and monstrous recipes to fall into two categories;
namely, the remedies which were exceedingly costly
and the remedies which were either very painful or
very disgusting. In other words, a large part of
the medical science of all past ages proves that the
doctors and their patients valued remedies in propor-
tion to the price to he paid for them^ either in money
or in suffering. In short, they adopted freely the
Doctrine of Sacrifice as applied to medicine. Con-

154 SACBIFIGIAL MSDIGINE.

sidering that Nature nearly always proceeds on pre-
cisely the opposite track, — that she does not ask us
" to do some great thing," but, like the true prophet,
only bids us " wash and be clean " ; makes the
cheapest and commonest things the most wholesome,
and affords us normally, by our instinctive desire or
loathing, the surest test of the fitness or unfitness
of food for our use, — there is something exceedingly
curious in the all but universal assumption of man-
kind that it was only necessary to find something
particularly rare and expensive, or else something
extraordinarily revolting, to obtain a panacea for all
the woes of mortality. It was ridiculous (in the
estimation of our forefathers) to suppose that a
great noble or king should dissolve pearls in his
drink or swallow liquid gold, and yet, forsooth, be
no better after all than a poor wretch who could
afford himself only a little milk or water. Still more
incredible was it that a man should submit to some
agonizing scarification or actual cautery, or should
compel himself to bolt some inexpressibly disgust-
ing mess which his doctor had taken a year to
concoct and distil through a score of furnaces and
retorts, and yet, when all was over, receive no more
benefit than if he had endured no hardship, or had
only drunk some cowslip julep or herb tea. Such
tame and impotent conclusions could not be received

SAGRIFICIAL MEDICINE. 166

for a moment. If patients would only pay enough
or %vffeT enough, they mu%t be cured. This, it
really seems, was the underlying conviction of men
of old, on which half the therapeutics of past times
were unconsciously based.

Let us cull a few illustrations of the ingenious
development of those principles by the invention of
nostrums distinguished by one or other of the grand
characteristics, roughly definable as costliness or
nastiness. Perhaps, ere the close of our brief re-
view, we may find we have less reason than we
fancy at starting to congratulate ourselves on the
disappearance of this phase of human folly, or to
rest assured that inductive science alone now rules
in the sick-room, and that neither doctors nor pa-
tients retain any faith in sacrificial medicine.

The use of costly things as remedies for disease
constitutes a kind of haute mSdedne necessarily of
limited application. With the exception of the
great search for the Aurvm Potahile in the Middle
Ages, there are much fewer traces of it than of the
other form of sacrifice, in which the patient payait
de 8a personne. Everybody could be scarified or
made to swallow worms and filth; but there were
not many patients who could afford to pay for emer-
alds to tie on their stomachs in cases of dysentery,
as recommended by Avenzor, nor for " eight grains

156 8ACBIFI0IAL MEDICINE.

of that noble lunar medicine, the wine of silver,"
nor for "dissolved pearls," either of which (Mat-
thioli assures us) is "sovereign against melan-
choly." Dioscorides might in vain recommend
powdered sapphires for starting eyes, or St.
Jerome vaunt their virtues for many other
troubles, to the majority of sufferers in their
own or any other age. Coral was more within
popular reach ; and probably a considerable number
of believing souls have followed Galen's prescrip-
tion and tried its use for spitting of blood, and
Pliny's recommendation of it for the stone. Avi-
cenna found that a cordial made of it is "singu-
larly productive of joy " ; and Matthioli says it has
"truly occult virtues against epilepsy," whether
"hung about the neck or drunk in powders."*
Emeralds or rubie^ and even silk (then a rarer
substancQ in Europe than now), afford, according
to Dioscorides, relief in a variety of ailments;
but of course nothing could be so generally, and
indeed universally, useful as gold. He who could

* As the modem mind may be a little puzzled as to the mode in which
some of these sabstances can be introduced into our internal economyi
the following extract from the FatnUy DictUmary of Dr. Salmon (16^6)
may throw light on the subject: "Coral, to prepare,— Take such a
quantity as ye think conyenient. Make it into a fine powder by grinding
it upon a Porphyry or an Iron Mortar. Drop on it by degrees a little rose-
water, and form it into balls for use. After this manner, Crabs'-Byes,
Pearls, Oister shells, and Precious stones are prepared to make up Cor-

SAGBIFIOIAL MBDIOINE. 157

discover how to make men actually drink the most
costly of metals would teach them nothing less
than the secret of immortality. The Aumm Potor
bile^ or noble "Solar Oyl," especially when mixed
with the "Lunar Oyl" of silver, and "Mercurial
Oyl," forms, as Bolnest assures us, "a great Arca-
num, fit to be used in most diseases, especially in
chronickr By itself alone, indeed, the drinkable
gold was understood to be an elixir of life, — a con-
clusion not a little remarkable, when we consider
that the only real value of the metal is its conven-
ience as a circulating medium and for the fabrica-
tion of ornaments, and that the artificial importance
thus attached to it must have so affected men's
minds as to cause them to idealize it as a sort of
divine antidote to disease and death.

In an earlier and truer-hearted age, Paradise was
believed to be a garden, and it was the Fruit of a
Tree of Life which would make men live forever.
But when, as Gibbon satirically observes, in the
dissolution of the Roman world, men coveted only
a place in the Celestial City of gold and pearl, the
secret of immortality was sought (not inappropri-
ately) at the bottom of a Rosicrucian cioicible.

dials compounded of them and other suitable materials for the strength-
ening of the heart in fevers, or such like violent diseases, and to restore
the Decays of nature." Ebony is swallowed by rasping it in shavings
and maWng a decoction.

158 SAOBIFICIAIi MEDIGOrE.

There was, it must be confessed, a profound
vulgarity in this whole system of costly medicine,
which it would be flattering to ourselves to tlunk
we had in our day quite overpassed and discarded.
But in truth, though we are not wont to dissolve
pearls or powder emeralds or drink solar or even
lunar " Oyl," it may be fairly asked whether we do
not contrive to melt down a handful of sovereigns
in every attack of illness to very little better pur-
pose than if we had simply given them to an old
alchemist to put in his furnace and make for us an
elixir of life ? What are these long rows of items
in our druggist's bill for draughts, embrocations,
liniments, blisters, gargles, and what not, repre-
sented, when the housemaid clears our room for con-
valescence, by a whole regiment of quarter-emptied
phials and pUl-boxes on our table ? What are those
considerable drafts recorded in our check-book, not
only for the attendance of our customary medical
adviser (which might be reasonable), but for the
visits of the eminent consulting physician, brought
down, perchance, fifty or five hundred miles to look
at us for five minutes while we lay speechless in
our fever? Did anybody ever use one-half, or even
one-third, of the expensive medicines ordered in
every illness from the pharmacy day after day?
Or did anybody find a medical man, in view of a

SAGBIFIGIAIi MEDICINE. 159

patient's straitened circumstances, teUing his anxious
friends that the remains o£ the last bottle of his
physic would answer as well as a new one, or that
they might readily change it, by adding a few drops
of some fresh ingredient, instead of ordering another
six ounces from the chemist, to be set aside in its
turn, half used, to-morrow? Or (what is still more
to the purpose) did anybody ever hear of a case
wherein the physician summoned for consultation
(possibly at enormous cost) has given his honest
opinion that the regular medical attendant of the
patient has mistaken his case, and that the treatment
ought to be altogether reversed?

The same idea has been at the bottom of our
proceedings and those of our ancestors which we
ridicule; namely, that if we do but spend money
enough, a cure must foUow.

But, as I remarked before, the notion that cost-
liness of itself is a test of medicinal virtue has been,
necessarily, far less prolific of results than the kin-
dred idea that by the pain and disgust entailed on
a patient might be estimated the value of the remedy
applied to his disease. As to disgust, it would
really appear as if some ancient prophets of the
healing art, some Phoebus Epicurios or -3Esculapius,
must have laid down as a principle for the selection
of health-restoring compounds and concoctions,

160 SACBIFIOIAI. HBDICINE.

" By their nauseousness ye shall know them." Else
were the recipes for all the hideous, abominable
witch-broths, wherewith the older books of mediciae
are replete, quite unaccountable on any theory of
human sanity. Many of them (which weak-souled
patients have swallowed by the ounce and the
pound) were of a kind which it is quite impossible
to quote; nor can we wonder that, as Plato tells us,
the Athenian physicians were wont to engage the
great rhetorician Gorgias to accompany them and
persuade their patients to take their prescriptions.
Let the following, however, be taken as moderate
examples : —

''Take what Animal soever thy fancy best liketh, and thou
thinkest most fit to prepare. Kill it and take it (but separate
nothing of its impurities, as feathers, hoofs, hairs, or other
heterogeneous substance), bruise all in a large and strong mortar
to a fit consistency, put it then into a vessel for putrefaction, and
put upon it of the blood of animals of the same kind so much as
may well moisten it, or, which is better, cover it all over. Shut
close the vessel and set it to putrifie, in fimo equino, for forty
dayes that it may ferment." (The result is to be distilled, cal-
cined, rectified, and distilled over again and again, '' seven times
to separate its phlegme," till finally) '' thou hast a pleasant [II],
safe, and noble Animal Arcanum to fortifie the animal life, and
restore health and vigor to its languishing spirit, till God doth call
for its final dissolution and separation." — Aurora Chymica, p. 6.

This was bad enough, but a great advance (in
the line of sacrifice) was made when to the mere

SACBIFICIAL MEDICINE. 161

odiousness, we may say beastliness, of the dose per
86 could be added the horror of eating what had
once formed part of a human body, — in short, of
cannibalism. The ordonnances which follow really
seem to have a connection with ancient idol-rites
of human sacrifice, and possibly (had we means of
tracing them) might be fathered on the earliest
worshippers of Hesus or of Odin. The seasons of
the year (spring and autumn) wherein the victim
must die (very carefully defined in these prescrip-
tions) seem to give color to this view. Down to
the conquest of Mexico by the Spaniards, Helps
tells us, the Aztecs used yearly to slay a young man
in spring that the nobles might eat his heart as a
sort of sacrament. Anyway, it is rather startling
to find that just two hundred years ago in London
the physician in ordinary to the King recommended
cannibalism to Englishmen without the smallest
apology or hesitation.

A Mummiall Q^inte88enee,

Take of the flesh of a sonnd yomig man, dying a natural
death about the middle of August, three or four pounds. Let
the flesh be taken from his thighs or other fleshy parts. Put it
into a fit glass and pour upon it spirit of wine. Let it stand so
three or four days. Take out the flesh and put it upon a glass
plate, and imbibe it with spirits of salts. Let it stand uncoyered,
but in the shade, where no dust or other filth may fall upon it,

162 SAGBIFICIAL MEDICINE.

Be sure yon often torn it, and, being well dried, yon may pnt it np
in a fit jar and keep it for nse. — Aurora Chymica, chap. iiL

A still more efficacious remedy, "producing won-
derful effects both in preserving and restoring
health," may be obtained by distilling, filtering, cal-
cining, and coagulating this " Mummiall " till it have
a " saccharine taste," when the " matter may be left
of the thickness or consistency of honey, which must
be kept in glass vessels closely shut." (Ibid.^ p. 8.)

If the "sound young man" should have been
killed in the spring instead of in "the middle of
August," the learned Dr. Bolnest is not without a
remedy. His flesh is, indeed, no longer useful for
a " Mummiall," but his blood may be made into a
"very high balsam, exceeding much the powers and
virtue of natural balsam; a potent preservative in
time of pestilence, leprosie, palsie, and gout of all
sorts."

" Take of snch blood a large quantity. Gather in glass vessels.
Let it settle some time till it hath thrown out all its waterish
humor, which separate by wary inclination. Take now of this
concrete blood five or six pounds, which put to ten or twelve
pints of spirits of wine. Shake them well together, and let it
digest six or eight days in warm ashes." Distil. Add the fixed
salt drawn out of the caput mortuum of the blood by '^ calcina-
tion," "solution," "filtration," "coagulation," often repeated;
"and what shall remain behind is the Arcanum of Blood"
(p. 10).

SACEIFICIAL MKDIOINB. 168

When obtained in the manner above described,
this invaluable remedy is " to be taken in broth or
treacle-water with a fasting" (and let us devoutly
hope an unusually vigorous) " stomach." Only one
caution is necessary. The "sound young man's"
blood must have been shed "when Mercury was
above the horizon and in conjunction with the sun
in Gemini or Virgo."

After the broth of man's blood, a "Balsamick
Remedy for Arthritick Pains," composed of the
bones of a man " which hath not been buried fully
a year," beat up into a powder, calcined, and ap-
plied on lint, appears a comparatively mild and
pleasant receipt. So, likewise, is the " Quintessence
of Toads," to be composed in the month of June
or July of a " great quantity of overgrown toads,"
reduced, calcined, and distilled as usual, and then
"dissolved in spirit of oranges or treacle-water ready
for use," either externally, when it cures "cancers
and pestilential venom,", or internally, against "all
sorts of poison."

The above prescriptions are taken, be it said, not
from the manual of one of those vulgar quacks to
whom we are too apt to credit every absurdity of
ancient medicine, but from a serious treatise by
Edward Bolnest, physician in ordinary to the King
(1672), dedicated to George Duke of Buckingham,

164 SAGBIFIOIAL MEDICINE.

and described on the title-page as ^'Shewing a
Rational [I] Way of preparing Animals, Vegetables,
and Minerals for a Physical Use, by which they are
made most efficacious, safe, and pleasant Medicines
for the Preservation and Restoration of the Life of
Man." How honest was the worthy author in his
belief in his " Mummiall Quintessence," and aU the
rest, may be judged from his frank avowal " to the
Reader" that the medicines prescribed he might " in
some measure in time of need trust to," because,
adds Dr. Bolnest candidly, "I never yet from the
best of medicines always found those certain effects
I could have desired."

These were, however, refined preparations com-
pared to the prescriptions in use in still earlier
generations. In the great folio of M. Pietro Andrea
Matthioli (Venice, 1621), adorned with hundreds of
really admirable woodcuts of medicinal herbs and
flowers, there are directions for rubbing wounds
with cow-dung, swallowing beeswax, silk, sweat, and
saliva, and drinking hare's blood and dog's dung
dissolved in milk as a cure for dysentery. Nervous
people are to dine on cooked vipers. Persons with
the toothache are to apply to their teeth a ser-
pent's skin steeped in vinegar, or to powder the
callosities on a horse's legs, and stuff their ears
therewith. A black eye may be treated with ^

SAOBIFIOIAL MEDIOIKE. 165

poultice of human milk, incense, and the blood of
a tortoise. For the not very serious affection of
hiccough a beverage is recommended, of which the
chief ingredient is the flesh of a mummy; thus
affording us further evidence that cannibalism sur-
vived in medicine, and was approved by the faculty
in Italy as well as England, down to a very recent
period. Besides these "strange meats," Matthioli
regularly classifies in a table a multitude of what he
is pleased to call " simple medicines," among which
are to be found the bodies, or parts of bodies, of
wolves, scorpions, centipedes, ostriches, beavers, and
dogs, the cast-off skins of serpents, the horns of
unicorns (when attainable I), the hoofs of asses and
goats, beeswax, silk, asphalt, and several filthy sub-
stances which cannot here be named. Albertus
Magnus (vide the curious little black-letter volume,
Le Q-rat Albert^ in the British Museum) orders
nervous patients to eat eagles' brains, whereby they
may acquire the courage of the king of birds ; while
the brains of the owl^ the goat, the camel, etc.,
convey the peculiar qualities of each of those ani-
mals. Pliny's great work, it is needless to say, is a
repertory of marvellous counsels and observations.
Earth taken out of a human skull acts as a depila-
tory, and benefit is derived from chewing plants
which have happened to grow in the same un-

166 SACBIFICIAL MEDIdKE.

pleasant receptacle. On the principle, we presume,
of **I am not the rose, but I have dwelt near the
rose," herbs growing on a manure heap are found
especially efficacious as remedies for quinsy. The
hair of man, taken from a cross, is good for quartan
fevers, and human ear-wax is the only proper appli-
cation to a wound occasioned by a human bite.
The uses of saliva are numberless, and fill a whole
chapter of the Natural History. " Fasting spittle,"
in particular, applied to the eyes, is an infallible
cure for ophthalmia, — a remedy which Persius
treats with blameworthy scepticism as an old-
womanly practice. In cases where bread has stuck
in the throat, a piece of the same loaf should be
inserted in the ears. The use of the fluid which
exudes from the pores of the skin is so valuable
that (Pliny assures us) the owners of the Grecian
gymnasia made a thriving trade by selling the
scrapings of the bodies of athletes, which, "com-
pounded with oil, is of an emollient, calorific, and
expletive nature." If any lady desire to cultivate
an interesting and pallid appearance, she ought to
imitate Drusus, who drank goats' blood to make it
appear that his enemy Cassius had poisoned him.
For melancholy (an affection which seems to have
given great concern to the old doctors), Dioscorides
recommends black hellebore held in the mouth, —

SACRIFICIAL MEDIOINB. • 167

certainly a recipe on homoeopatliic principles, since
a mouthful of hellebore would scarcely naturally
serve, like the Psalmist's wine and oQ, either to
make glad the heart of man or to give him a
cheerful countenance. A better remedy for the
same melancholy is "broth of old cock," our
Scotch friend cockaleekie.

For some unexplained reason, two only among
the ills to which flesh is heir, and they among the
most serious, — frenzy and inflammation of the stom-
ach, — seem to have escaped from the dread rSgime
of Sacrificial Medicme, and indeed are treated with
surprising lenity. Dioscorides thinks that frenzy
can be cured by asparagus and white wine, and con-
siders that the patient suffering from gastritis should
have a plaster of roses applied to the seat of his
disease !

Besides the " exhibition " of nauseous and revolt-
ing draughts, boluses, and pills, the system of Sacri-
ficial Medicine has at all times commanded many
other ingenious resources for the creation of unnec-
essary pain, trouble, and annoyance to sick persons
and their friends. If, for example, a stiff-necked
patient were unmanageable in the matter of some
particularly disagreeable dose, he might still be
induced to go on vexing nature by some out-of-the-
way diet, and potions repeated at stated intervals,

168 SAGBIFICIAL MEDICINE.

till fiutli or life succumbed in the struggle. One old
physician, JEtius, in this way prescribed for the gout
a separate dietary for every month of a whole year.
Another, the great Alexander of Tralles, ordained
three hundred and sixty-five potions, so arranged as
to furnish out a course for two years; whereupon
Dr. Friend, the learned author of the History of
Phyiick^ remarks that ^' his receipts were as good as
any of those which our new pretenders to physick
make use of," but adds the discouraging dictum,
" After all, gout is a distemper with which it were
best not to tamper."

Then there were fearful tortures in the way of
excoriations, of which St. John Long's famous
remedy was a notable example, — blisters, cauteries,
and setons, too unpleasant to dwell upon. Scarifi-
cation was a comparatively merciful form of these
inflictions. It was practised, according to Prosper
Albinus (JERsU Phys.^ p. 17), in the following agree-
able manner: "First, make a strait [tight] ligature
on the leg ; then rub the leg below it, put it into
warm water, and beat till it swells^ and so scarify " !
Something worse than this was practised down to
the present generation in the case of wounds. It is
in the writer's recollection that an unhappy groom
who had lost a piece of flesh out of the calf of his
leg sought assistance after his accident from a

SACRIFICIAL MBDICINB. 169

motherly old cook, the medical adviser in ordinary
of the whole household. The good woman evi-
dently held the doctrine of Sacrificial Medicine deep
in her soul, as well as a due estimate of the utility,
under all circumstances, of the art of cookery.
Encouraging the poor young man with suitable
reflections on the purifying use of salt and fire, she
accordingly rubbed a handful from her salt-box into
the wound, and then held the miserable limb steadily
to the kitchen fire !

A bath of blood has been frequently employed to
resuscitate exhausted patients. When Caesar Borgia
barely survived swallowing his share of the bottles
of poisoned wine which his respectable father. Pope
Alexander VI., had intended for the Cardinal, but
took by mistake for himself and his son, it is said
that an ox was brought into Caesar's apartments and
disembowelled, to enable him to get into it .and
receive such vitality as the warm, bleeding carcass
might impart. We are here at the point where Sac-
rificial Medicine assumes the vicarious form, and the
poor brutes are made to suffer instead of the human
patients for the benefit of the latter. In an account
of the birth of the Due de Bourgogne, grandson of
Louis XIV., in the Curio%itS% Historiquea (p. 48),
amid the description of the raptures of the splen-
did court assembled on the occasion, there is a

170 8ACEIFICIAL MEDICINE.

casual mention of an incident affording a wonderful
contrast to all this royal joy and magnificence.
The attendant chief accoucheur^ the celebrated Dr.
Clement, to prevent suffering on the part of the
mother (the Dauphine), applied to her person the
skin of a sheep, newly flayed. To obtain this quite
fresh, a butcher was engaged to skin the animal
alive in the adjoining room ; and, being anxious to
offer the skin as quickly as possible to the doctor,
he carried it into the chamber of the Dauphine,
leaving the door open. The sheep, in its agony,
followed him, and ran in, bleeding and skinless,
among the shrieking crowd of courtiers and gran-
dees. In modern times, worse things than these are
done to animals, professedly for the benefit of man-
kind; but they are now performed quietly in
physiological laboratories, not paraded in public, else
it is to be believed that even the most selfish among
us would cry, "Hold! we desire no cure of disease,
no scientific knowledge, at any such horrible price."
Yet, again, there was a class of Sacrificial Rem-
edies whose merit consisted in requiring the patient
to travel a long way, or to apply to some hardly
accessible personage, to obtain relief. There were
Holy Wells having no medicinal properties what-
ever, which cured all the multitudes of people who
made long and painful pilgrimages to reach them.

SAOEIFICIAL MEDIOINB. 171

More remarkable still were the benefits derived in
cases of scrofula from being touched by a king, — a
privilege, it may be safely guessed, not accorded
without some delay and solicitation, and possibly
not without fees to royal attendants, scarcely dis-
interested witnesses of the miracles which followed.
The history of this particular delusion would alone
form a very curious chapter, since Archbishop Brad-
wardine, in 1348, appealed to the whole world in
proof of the wonder, tUl Samuel Johnson's scarred
and mighty head was subjected to the royal touch.
When we recall the fact that only in the eighteenth
century did a special religious service for the cere-
mony cease to form a part of the Liturgy of the
Church of England, we do not seem to ourselves to
have yet advanced a great way beyond this harmless
superstition. Indeed, it is only in the present gen-
eration that the scientific name of the malady has
generally superseded its familiar title of the " King's
Evil," or by ellipsis " the Evil," by which it is even
now known in remote parts of the country.

Where it was impossible to obtain help from a
king, there yet remained the possibility of being
touched by somebody else, who might possess some
rare and peculiar privilege and fitness for healing dis-
ease. The odd malady, popularly called " shingles,"
for example, somehow suggested to the sufferers the

172 SAOBIFIGIAL MEDIdKlS.

desirability of haying recourse to some special agency
of relief; and this was found in persons who had
either themselves eaten the flesh of an eagle, or
whose fathers or ancestors had done so. Within
the last thirty years, a gentleman's servant in Wales
has been known to perform a journey of forty miles
across the mountains to be touched by a man whose
grandfather had eaten an eagle.

Finally, there is a large heterogeneous class of
prescriptions, obviously owing their origin to the
principle of Sacrificial Medicine, of which the simple
rule has been to prevent the miserable patient from
adopting any mode of relief for his sufferings which
Nature might point out, and adding to them fresh
pain by any ingenious device which may occur to
his physician. Of this kind was the treatment of
fever in vogue till quite recently, when the patient
was carefully shut up in a close room, with well-
curtained bed and warm bedclothes, and was pro-
hibited from relieving his thirst with any cold drink.
Truly, if Marcellus Sidetes, who is said to have
written forty-two books in " heroic " verse " concern-
ing distempers," had given us a picture of all the
misery which must have been occasioned in the
world by the really insolent disregard of Nature and
common sense shown in these matters, — how many
thousands of lives have been thrown away, and

8ACBIFIGIAL MEDIOINE. 178

through what maddening misery the survivors must
have struggled back to life, — those poems, instead
of being forgotten by the world, might have done
us precious service by reminding us that there is
some counterweight to be placed in the scale
wherein we are wont to measure our debts of grati-
tude to medical science.

Another appalling device was that of the renowned
English physician, John of Gaddesden, who intro-
duced the practice of treating the small-pox by
wrapping up the patient in scarlet, hanging his
room in scarlet, and in fact compelling him to rest
his feverish eyes only on that flaring hue. John
tried this notable device, according to his own show-
ing, on one of the sons of King Edward I. (it does
not appear to which he refers), and complacently
adds to his report, "e^ est bona eura.^^ In those
days, however, doors and windows were not made
air-tight, and up the capacious chimneys a consider-
able portion of fresh air must always have rushed.
It was reserved for a later generation to perfect the
ingenious system for aggravating and intensifying
fever by pasting down the modern window, closing
the registers, and (as a climax) engaging nurses to
lie beside the sufferer to keep up the heat! The
writer heard some years ago from the lips of a Mem-
ber of Parliament, now deceased, the recital of his

174 SAOBIFIOIAIi MEDIOIHS.

own treatment as a boy, in or near London, under
a severe attack of small-pox. His life being spe-
cially valuable as that of an only son, his affectionate
parents, by the advice of a distinguished physician,
obtained the services of two fat women^ who were
established permanently in bed on each side of
the child during the whole course of the disease 1
What stipend was offered to tempt these poor
obese females to perform this awful service has
escaped from the record.

Reading over all these marvellous prescriptions,
it is a refreshing exercise to picture the fashionable
"leech," the Gull or Jenner of the period, physi-
cian in ordinary to the King or Queen, suave and
solemn, fiUed to the brim with all the conscious
dignity of Science, standing beside the sick-bed of
some mighty prince or peer, and giving to the awe-
stricken attendants his high commands to hang the
room with scarlet cloth^ or to bring to the patient
one of the horrid messes prepared with such infinite
pains under his direction, in his own laboratory.
We can almost hear him condescendingly explaining
to the chief persons present what occult relationship
exists between the small-pox and the scarlet cloth,
or how the Arcanum of Toads comes to be specially
valuable, having been composed of the fattest old
toads, selected precisely at the right season, — viole^

SACEIFICIAL MEDICINB. 175

licet midsummer. Of course, in each successive
generation there was nothing for the unlearned laity
to do but to bow submissively to the dicta of the
exponent of Science as it existed at the time.
People may always laugh at what is past and gone ;
but to suspect that living men may be mistaken,
or that new systems of medicine, philosophy, or
theology, may be destined, like the old, to "have
their day and cease to be," is audacity to which
no one should advance. We dare not, therefore,
suggest that, to our grandsons, half our modem
nostrums (of which the fashion comes in freshly one
season and usually falls into disrepute a few years
after) may possibly appear scarcely a degree less
ridiculous than the Arcanum of Toads or the Mum-
miall Quintessence. It was not much worse, after
all, to make a patient drink a dead man's blood
than to rob him of his own, in the Sangrado style
to which (in the memory of us all) the world owes
the loss of Cavour. It would have been a mercy
to a poor Florentine lady, lately deceased, had her
physician counselled her merely to eat earth-worms
pickled in vinegar, or green lizards boiled alive in
oil, as recommended by Dr. Salmon, instead of
bleeding her from the arm nineteen times in the
fortnight following her confinement and (as may be
readily understood) preceding her untimely death.

176 SACBIFIGIAL MEDICINE.

Sacrificial Medicine, however, in its simpler and
more easily recognizable forms, is undoubtedly on
the wane, though a good deal of its spirit may stiU
be traced in our behavior to the sick. To homoe-
opathy (as to many another kind of heresy), we
probably owe somewhat of the mitigation of ortho-
doxy; and children, noticing the busts of Hahne-
mann in the shop windows, may be properly taught
to bless that great deUverer who banished from the
nursery those huge and hateful mugs of misery, —
black founts of so many infantine tears, — mugs of
sobs and sighs and gasps and struggles unutterable,
from one of which Madame Roland drew the first
inspiration of that martyr spirit which led her
onward to the guillotine, when she suflfered herself
to be whipped six times running, sooner than swal-
low the abominable contents.

THE FITNESS OF WOMEN FOR THE MIN-
ISTRY OF RELIGION.

THE FITNESS OP WOMEN FOR THE
MINISTRY OF RELIGION.

Among the anomalies of our social state may be
counted the fact that, while it is generally admitted
that women are more religious than men, it is to
men that in our age and country the Ministry of
Religion is (with infinitesimal exceptions) exclu-
sively committed. While nine persons out of ten
are conscious that their earliest sentiments of piety
have been derived from a mother, and that a sister-or
a wife has alone enabled the troubled faith of their
latter years to survive the shocks of worldliness and
doubt, there is yet not one recognized channel by
which these waters of life, stored in the fountain of
women's hearts, can flow beyond the narrowest
borders ; while, on the contrary, it is not too much
to surmise that to a very large number of clergy-
men, well-meaning, learned, and conscientious, the
sense of dryness of soul in all that concerns the
more spiritual part of their office is a perpetual
self-reproach. JBabitans in Sicca writes every

180 THE FITNESS OP WOMEN

autumn in the newspapers to complain he can
obtain no refreshment from his weekly sermon at
any church in his neighborhood, while around him
all the time are private wells and underground
rivers of the purest element of feeling for which he
thirsts. It is a case of

" Water, water, everywhere,
But not a drop to drink."

What we want first and above all things in our
ministers of religion is tJiat they should be intensely
religious; and knowing this, and that all other gifts
and acquirements are comparatively of smaU avail
for the purpose, we deliberately exclude from the
sacred office that moiety of the commimity among
whom this special and most precious grace is, at all
events, least rare.*

The reasons for this exclusion are, however, amply
sufficient to account, historically, for the anomaly.
They are of two kinds, which I shall take leave to
characterize as the Bad and the Good. There is
a very deep-rooted prejudice, inherited from the
ascetics of early Christianity, whereby the idea of

• It will be seen that I diflFer toto caelo on this point from Mr. Mahaif y
in his interesting recent essay on the Decay of Preachinff. He. seems
to me only to recognize the morcU and irUeUeetudl forces which move
men, and these compared with the spiritual are only what mechanical
ones are to the electric.

FOE THE MINISTET OP BEUGION. 181

womanhood is connected with very base associations.
It is impossible to ignore this fact in any review of
the religious position of the sex ; and it is therefore
better to say bluntly that, from this point of view,
a woman is looked upon rather as an endssary from
the pit than a "daughter of the Lord Almighty,"
rather a temptation to earthly passion than a help-
mate to heavenly purity. Springing up when the
old classical world had sunk into a corruption and
foulness which we can now probably little realize
in imagination, the frenzy of asceticism which was
nourished among the deserts of the Thebaid and
attained its full growth in the monasteries of Greece
and Italy, — the origin of all the legends of which the
"Temptation of St. Anthony" is the type,* — has
left almost ineffaceable traces throughout the nations
of Europe ; of course much more sharply marked in
the Latin and Greek Churches, which have canon-
ized these poor fanatics, and still set apotheosized

•Ingoldsby'B rendering of this world-famous story, the favorite theme
of so many eminent painters, is probably no very exaggerated reading of
the general impression of the monastic mind respecting the fair sex :—
<< There are many deyils which walk this world,
Devils great and devils small,
Devils short add devils tall ;
Bold devils which go with their tails unfurled.
Sly devils which carry them quite upcurled ;

But a laughing woman with two bright eyes
IB the worsest devU of aU r>

182 THE FITNESS OF WOMEN

virginity on one of the thrones of heaven, than
among Protestant communities, wherein marriage
has been always placed on a moral level with celi-
bacy, and Martin Luther has been thoroughly ab-
solved for his conjugal affection for the singularly
plain old lady whose portrait by Lucas Cranach
we beheld some years ago in the Exhibition of Old
Masters ii. Burlington House.* Nevertheless, even
among Protestant Christians, a certain impression
has remained, the reverse of the faith of their old
Teuton forefathers, that women were nearer to the
mind of the Divinity than men. The highest relig-
ious stattLS a woman could attain in Milton's opinion
was a sort of deputy piety, —

" He for God only, she for God in him" ;

a type which, considering the kind of representatives
of the Deity which some of Adam's descendants
have proved to their wives, is scarcely to be ranked
as elevated. The paramount influence of St. Paul's
mind in generating (as Rowland Williams expresses it)
the religious atmosphere which Protestants breathe,

* I know not on what authority the familiar joTial couplet has been
attributed to the great Reformer : —

" Wer liebt nicht Wein, Weib, und Gesang
Der blelbt ein Narr sein Leben lang."
The ascetic spirit had very far departed, at all events, from th9 author
who composed it.

FOR THE MINISTRY OF RELIGION. 188

and the great celibate Apostle's semi-ascetic feelings
about women, have seemingly counteracted the hered-
itary predisposition of Saxondom to reverence them.
His treatment of Marriage (reproduced in the exor-
dium of the Solemnization of Holy Matrimony in the
English Book of Common Prayer, and apparently
intended to show how unholy are the sentiments
assumed to form the usual basis of that alliance) has
certainly tended to preserve the prestige of Scriptural
dignity and authority for sentiments on such sub-
jects derived from Southern races and coarser times,
and which might else have died out ere now in Teu-
tonized Europe. That, considering the hysterical
behavior of his male converts, when "every one
hath a psalm, hath a doctrine, hath a tongue, hath a
revelation, hath an interpretation," * prudence justi-
fied St. Paul in prohibiting female locutions in public
worship may be fully conceded. But the unhappy
petrifaction of his current directions, whereby (like
so many other Biblical utterances) they have become
laws for all time and every divergency of circum-
stance, has been attended with lamentable conse-
quences. No Jewish law-giver ever bade the Miriams
and Deborahs, the Esthers and Judiths, of his race,
^^keep silence," and hide their diminished heads from

•L Gor. z!y., 26. If this graphic description liad applied to a femaU
■honld we liaye ever been allowed to forget the circumstance ?

184 THB FITKE88 OF WOMEN

regard to " the angels," or to anybody else in or out of
temple or camp ; and the consequence has been (as a
very remarkable paper by a Jewish lady has pointed
out) * that female patriots, judges, and prophetesses
have played a noble and conspicuous part through
the whole history of Judaism. But (not to speak
profanely) St. Paul has been supposed to act like
Louis XIV., when he forbade that any more healing
wonders should be done at the tomb of the Abb^

Paris: —

''De par le Roi — Defense a Dieu^

De faire miracle en ce lieu.''

If it were to please Providence to inspire a woman
with any of the gifts of the prophetic or ministerial
offices, if ever the promise should be fulfilled to the
letter that " your sons and your daughters shall proph-
esy," and that the impulse to speak holy words were
to seize her in the most natural and appropriate
place, to wit, in church, St. Paul is quoted as author-
ity to check any such irregular and unsuitable pro-
ceeding : " I suffer not a woman to speak in church."
The result has been that, except among the Quakers
(who have coolly set the prohibition aside, and seem-
ingly profited not a little by so doing), Christian
rivals to the heroines of Judaism are not producible.
During these last eighteen centuries, among all the

•«The Hebrew Woman," by Constance de Rotiisohfld (Mn. Cyril
Vlofwer).

FOB THE MINISTRY OF RELIGION. 185

millions of women in whose hearts the precepts of
Christ have been sown and borne rich fruit, there
may well have been a few whose eloquence and
fervor of piety would have influenced the heart of
men as much as a St. Bernard or a Peter the Hermit,
and whose words, like those of a Tauler, a F^nelon,
or an h. Kempis, would have remained a spiritual
treasure for all time. But if such have lived and
felt and thought, and longed perhaps to speak to
their fellow-men out of the abundance of their
hearts, their mouths have been effectually stopped.
Order has reigned in the Churches so far as they
were concerned, and whatever light they might per-
chance have borne into the dark places of the earth,
instead of being set on a candlestick, has been care-
fully covered up under a bushel.

Such are, I venture to think, the bad reasons for
the exclusion of women from the ministry. Good
ones, however, are certainly forthcoming, if per-
chance, when weighed in the scale against the argu-
ments in favor of such an innovation, they prove less
heavy. They are drawn from circumstances, some
of which pertain to the order of nature, and can
never be altered ; while others might be, or are al-
ready in process of change.

The functions of a minister of religion, as under-
stood in modem times (apart from priestly claims

186 THE FTTNESS OP WOMEN

to administer sacraments by special divine commis-
sion, with which we need not concern ourselves
here), are, roughly speaking, twofold: 1st, public
prayer and preaching; and, 2d, pastoral ministra-
tions in the homes of the members of the congre-
gation. Regarding the first, women labor under
several disadvantages, sometimes amounting to dis-
abilities. Though women's voices, when good^ reach
farther than those of men, a considerable number
are deficient in the physical vocal power indispensa-
ble to make themselves heard in an assembly num-
bering above one or two hundred persons. Nothing
would be more pitiable and ridiculous than for one
of these ladies, whatever might be her mental gifts,
to mount a pulpit and, with feeble voice rising
only to crack in an occasional screech, to attempt
to pour forth exhortations which three-fourths of
her audience could not hear, and under which the
remainder would writhe in an auditorial purga-
tory. Secondly, there can be no question that the
average female intellect is below the average male
intellect, and consequently that there are fewer
women than men up to the mark of intellectual
competence, below which preaching, however well
intended, and even inspired by genuine and true
feeling, is apt rather to " give occasion to the enemy
to blaspheme " than to tend to edifying. If the

FOE THE MINISTBT OF RELIGION. 187

foolish tilings of the world often confound the wise,
the foolish people in it provoke and distract them ;
and, even to their humblest hearers, many such well-
meaning silly ones would be little else than the
blind leading the blind into a ditch. Lamentable
as it would be to hear a shrill feminine squeak
delivering from the desk the majestic periods of Job
and Isaiah, it would be doubly deplorable to listen
to a thin and only too distinctly audible soprano
enouncing alternately from the pulpit platitudes,
ineptitudes, and blunders, such as memory recalls
only too keenly to many of us as among the severest
trials of the domestic circle. A special peril in this
matter also lies in the ill-omened circumstance that
the greater the folly of the woman, so much greater,
alas! is generally to be found her propensity to
preach in private, and therefore, it may presumably
be dreaded, her proclivity to extend to a larger
sphere the benefit of her exhortations. It has been
the observation of the present writer, through a
long experience, that masculine and feminine folly
usually differ in this essential particular. A man
fool dimly perceives he is a fool, and holds his
tongue accordingly; or (if the vanity of his sex
prevent him from arriving consciously at any such
conviction or conclusion) he deems that as pru-
dence is the better part of vq,lor, so is silence the

188 THE PITNBSS OF WOMEN

proper garb of wisdom, and that the less he wastes
on an ungrateful world the precious jewels of his
ideas, the more credit shall he have for those sup-
posed to remain in the casket of his mind. A man
who talks much is nine times out of ten a clever
and brilliant person, and may possibly be the most
profound of thinkers, who brings out of the inex-
haustible treasury of his imagination things new and
old. A woman fool, on the contrary, usually does
not find out, till she is old and ugly and the habit
of siUy chatter is irretrievably settled, that she is a
fool at all : probably for the simple reason that the
more folly she talks, the more delighted her male
admirers generally show themselves with her dis-
course. Even if she does not happen to think her-
self particularly clever or well-informed, she has
been taught to believe that ability in a woman is
rather a defect to be concealed than a gift to be
exhibited, and that, as the sagacious Chinese proverb
has it, " The glory of a man is knowledge, but the
glory of a woman is to renounce knowledge." Ac-
cordingly, without the slightest reticence or dread
of exposure, she tumbles out of her untidy brain
notions as trivial and mesquin as the contents of her
own disorderly work-basket, — here a button and
there a spangle, a thimble, a bit of crochet, a string
pf b^ads, a tangled skein of silk, and a little ribbon

FOE THE MINISTEY OF RELIGION. 189

marked with inches wherewith to measure the uni-
verse. The result of this difference in the display
of folly is naturally to lend color to a somewhat
exaggerated estimate of that surplusage of feeble-
ness and frivolity in the feminine scale, of the exist-
ence of which, alas! there can be no doubt, but
which is perhaps less than is supposed out of pro-
portion with the correlative dulness and stupidity
in the masculine balance. As the immortal Mrs.
Poyser sums up the matter, "Women are fools.
God Almighty made them so to match the men."
Thus, then, two arguments at least against admit-
ting women to the ministry rest on natural and inevi-
table grounds: some women are physically, some
other women mentally, incapable of adequately ful-
filling its duties. And to these adverse reasons
others are added by the actual though not inevi-
table conditions of society. Women, up to the-
present time, have been almost indefinitely less well
educated than men, and only their superior quick-
ness and tact prevented this inequality from telling
disastrously in common life ; while nothing could
hinder it from doing so, were they to undertake
the office of public teachers. By hook or crook,
with little teaching (and that teaching generally
fourth or fifth rate of its kind), women have man-
aged pretty generally to scrape together and store

190 THE FITNESS OP WOMKK

up in their memories in a happy-go-lucky way a
certain quantity of knowledge, useful and orna-
mental enough to pass muster. Women's culture,
when women are cultivated, sometimes (perhaps we
may say often) possesses rather more breadth than
that of men, and includes a good many topics rarely
included in the masculine curriculum. It is there-
fore well suited to furnish pleasure to the possessor
and entertainment to her acquaintance and readers ;
but the accuracy and definiteness of knowledge
which men obtain, thanks to their much abused
classical and mathematical training, are what every
ordinarily educated woman with a grain of sense
sighed for, till the day when the great movement
for the Higher Education of Women reared a more
fortunate generation. Now, it is clearly highly de-
sirable, if not absolutely indispensable, that a person
who may be called upon to treat publicly and didac-
tically, if not controversially — and let us hope and
pray that women will not generally take to contro-
versy! — almost every subject in the range of the
higher interests of man, who at least ought not to
regard any such interest as foreign ground, should
possess not merely wide, but accurate information,
and be as far as possible above the liability to com-
mit any gross blunders. This is of course viewing
the subject apart from any special theological train-

FOR THE MINISTBY OP RELIGION. 191

ing such as the older Churches have deemed almost
the first qualification for the ministerial office. Even
the poor Capuccini preaching friars, whose astound-
ing ignorance of profane history and science affords
inexhaustible tales of merriment in Italy, who talk
of " the great St. Augustine of Hippo, who crowned
King Alfred, who signed Magna Charta," and are
wont to indulge in such figures of rhetoric as im-
aginary sniflGs roxmd the pulpit at the smell of the
roasting flesh of St. Lawrence on his gridiron, —
even these poor old fellows have received adequate
instruction in the doctrines, the legends, and the
moral and penitential systems of their Church.
Proverbially ignorant as are the Greek Popes and
the Nestorian, Coptic, and Maronite priests, they,
too, are perfectly well "up" in all those recondite
dogmas which are supposed to be their peculiar con-
cern, and can tell with unerring certainty whether
the Second Divine Person had two natures or two
wills, or only one of each, or whether the Third
positively proceeded from the First only, according
to Greek orthodoxy, or from the First and Second,
according to that of Rome and Canterbury. Nearer
home, of course, theological education is a wider and
more serious matter. If young priests at Maynooth
are taught the astronomical system which makes the
sun go round the earth, and the moral system ol

192 THE FITNESS OF WOMEN

Peter Dens, which is nearly as completely the
reverse of truth, they still receive an enormous
amount of something which goes by the name of
instruction, and in the matters of scholastic theology
and casuistry are probably qualified to beat a great
many eminent D.D.'s of Oxford and Cambridge.
Here in England, and in Scotland also, every Church,
Established and Dissenting, has its college or col-
leges for training its clergy, either apart from or
together with students intended for lay professions ;
and, without the degree or certificate afforded by
such institution, the entry into the ministry is
barred. Christendom, in short, has, like Judaism,
its "Schools of the Prophets"; and nobody is in-
vited to prophesy, even if he be pious and gifted
as John Bunyan, who has not passed through them
ind learned his lesson.

The necessity for this theological training, so far
is it concerns the insurance of orthodox doctrine
from the acolyte when he becomes a preacher, of
course falls to the ground when we contemplate an
order of things quite outside the orthodox churches,
and such as it is not to be anticipated they will sanc-
tion for many a day. Our female preacher is by the
hypothesis, for the present at all events, either quite
brregularly connected with the orthodox sects, a Min-
ister Unattached or Amateur Pastor (and some such

FOR THE MTNISTBY OP RELIGION. 193

there are at this moment doing a vast deal of good
work, e.g.^ Miss Catherine Marsh and the sister of
Mr. Spurgeon) ; or if ever oflBcially recognized, and
a professional minister, then as belonging to some
heterodox communion, such as the Salvation Army :
or those in America, which profit by the services
of the Rev. Phoebe Hanaford, the Rev. Antoinette
Brown, and the late Rev. Celia Burleigh; and the
Unitarian congregation at Melbourne, which honored
itself by choosing for their pastor Martha Turner, a
lady whose great abilities and noble spiritual feeling
seem to me to hold out the very example we seek of
what a woman in the pulpit may and ought to be.*
No necessity exists compelling a female preacher
who enlists under the banner of religious freedom to
undergo the particular mental drill which qualifies
the Romanist or Anglo-Catholic clergyman for the
performance of all the peculiar intellectual labors
and combats necessary to his office, and included in
the duty of honestly believing exactly all which his
Church believes, and being equipped to do battle
with anybody who believes anything less or anything
more. But is there on this account less reason that
the candidate for another kind of ministry should

* A sennon by this lady on " The Sacrament of Life/* preached and
printed at Melhoome, would amply justify, I think, to every reader the
ahore remaxk.

194 THE FITNESS OP WOMEN

undertake less severe studies and go through a less
complete mental training than the embryo priest,
Latin or Anglican? The reverse has been most
wisely maintained by the Unitarian body in this
country, whose scheme of theological culture (if the
present writer may presume to estimate it) is wider
and deeper than that which is demanded to qualify
the possessor for the See of Canterbury. The
teacher of religion who is to be something more than
the expounder of a ready-prepared catechism, — who
is to lead his flock not merely into one particular
paddock, and to water them exclusively at one par-
ticular pond, but into every field of sweet and whole-
some herbage, and beside every stream of living
waters, — whose duty it will be to pluck up the cruel
brambles, and clear away the piles of stones of
doubts and difficulties which grow and are flung by
careless hands along the path of faith and life, — such
a teacher ought to be furnished with every aid which
learning can offer. Above all, I should hold that a
woman who should venture to assume this high and
arduous task specially needs such equipment, since,
for a long time to come, she must expect to be more
than others the mark of question and criticism ; and
the very eagerness of her own mind may (unless
weighted by solid erudition) carry her more quickly
and more remotely astray. Every one must have

1*08 THE MDTISTBY OlT RELIGION. l95

noticed how there are some persons full of original-
ity and mother-wit, who continually fancy they are
making fresh observations and theories, while their
next neighbor, who has never had an idea properly
his own, can tell them o£F on his fingers what
ancient sage first made their observation, and when
and by whom in the Middle Ages their theory was
broached, and how it was refuted and abandoned
by all thinking people several centuries ago. The
merely original man makes himself ridiculous for
want of learning, and is, in fact, always beginning
de novo at the bottom of the ladder of human
thought. The mere scholar is nothing better than a
Conversations-Lexicon, and never exercises any in-
fluence except that of a useful drag on the ideas of
his friends when they are going down-hill. The true
teacher must indispensably combine both the gift of
originality and the acquirement of such stores of
knowledge as shall enable him to trace doctrines and
hypotheses to their sources, — to know what has
been said for and against them by the greater think-
ers of the world who have dealt with them, — and, in
a word, to know exactly how far he is or is not a
heretic, and not be (as is the commonest of cases) a
heinous heretic while he believes himself strictly or-
thodox, and strictly orthodox and even commonplace
when he enunciates what he fondly conceives to be a

196 THE FITNESS OF WOMEN

bold and startling heresy. All this applies (for rea-
sons too obvious to need animadversion) pre-emi-
nently to teachers of the more impulsive sex. Ac-
cordingly, we must admit that the argument against
female ministers of religion, founded on the lower
educational status of women at present, is, so far as
it goes, perfectly valid.

Lastly, there is an argument which I imagine
would half-consciously influence many serious-minded
people against the admission of women to such an
office. Women are (thanks to all sorts of causes,
historical, political, personal, with which we need not
concern ourselves) actually much deconsidered by
men. Would not their deconaideration be reflected
on Religion itself, were they to become its authorized
ministers ? With enormous labor, the Broad Church
school has been trying to efface the stamp of effemi-
nacy from their order, to cultivate " muscular Chris-
tianity," and make laymen of the order of the author
of Sword and Q-own remember that a priest is
not necessarily an old woman. If many women, old
or young, enter the ministry, will not this effort to
redeem the character of the order be entirely thrown
away, and the impression become quite ineffaceable
that Manliness and Godliness are two orbs always
seen in opposition, and never in conjunction? I
confess I should feel such a fear as this to form

FOB THB MINI8TEY OF RBLIGION. . 197

a very cogent argument, were it altogether well
founded.

Let us now, before attempting to discuss the pos-
sible advantages to be set against all these objections
to the religious ministry of women, briefly run back
over the heads we have passed, and see if there be
not some answer to each objection, or at least some
hope that its force might with time and care be neu-
tralized.

First, there was noticed the ascetic feeling, in-
herited from the old monks, of the essential unholi-
ness of women, and their consequent unworthiness
DO meddle with sacred things. This idea has proba-
bly occurred for the first time to many an English
lady when she has penetrated by chance into some
hallowed precinct, some tempting and shadowy clois-
ter, of a monastery in Italy or Syria, and has been
driven out tumultuously by a whole flock of cowled
and sandalled brethren, cackling like so many geese
at the intrusion of a cat into a hen-house. Per-
haps, as at Vallombrosa among the Apennines, or
St. Saba in the desert, she has seen the gentlemen
of her party courteously received and comfortably
lodged within the noble walls of the convent, while
she has been left to such nocturnal repose as might
be found in a flea-haunted pavilion outside, or in her
tent pitched in a vaUey of centipedes. She has been

198 THB FTTNESS OF WOMEN

accustomed to think of women generally as of the
types common in decent English society, a little
strait-laced, or perhaps a little " gushing," as the case
may be; and she has very honestly taken it for
granted that, if there be any serious harm in the
world, it is the opposite sex who are principally to
blame. Suddenly, it is revealed to her that, by a
large number of her fellow-creatures, she herself
and all her female belongings, — her eminently re-
spectable governesses, the Misses Prunes and Prism ;
her dear old grandmother, Mrs. Goody-Good; and
her majestic aunt, Lady Bountiful, — all are looked
upon as little better than so many Succubi of
Satan, sent to lure, the souls of those ridiculous old
monks to destruction. The shock has not rarely
produced a peal of ungovernable laughter such as
those hoary cloisters had never echoed ere profane
Saxon Balmorals trod their pavement ; but, when la
pazza Signorina Inghae has retired to her hotel or
her tent, she finds that a new and very unpleasant
light has been thrown on matters whereon she had
never reflected before. Modem English Ritualism
and Monasticism are doing their best, in more ways
than need now be specified, to introduce into English
life these Oriental and gross ideas about women, that
pseudo-purity which is most impure. In so far as
they prevail, they will do us an injury quite iqcalcu-

FOE THE MINISTBY OF BEMGION. 199

lable. Needless to say that, to people trained in
such a school, a female minister of religion would be
a monstrous thing. Almo9t as well might the creat-
ure trUl out the melodies of La Traviata or La
Q-rande DuchesBe^ or perform her part in a ballet in
the costume of a sylph ! The view of womanhood
taken by these ultra-sanctified persons and by the
most cynical and profligate old vouSb is practically
the same. Surely, it is to be hoped that all this
worse than folly will be swept away in the blast of
public impatience and indignation which sooner or
later must burst, like a breath of wholesome autumn
storm, through the incense-laden atmosphere of Rit-
ualism, and consign to the four winds all its trum-
pery of millinery, chandlery, and upholstery, and the
thoroughly base and materialistic ideas which have
come in along with them 1

Secondly, among the bad reasons for the exclusion
of women from the pulpit, we have referred to St.
Paul's dictum, " I suffer not a woman to speak in
church." Whatever high degree of human wisdom
we must all attribute to the greatest of the apostles,
or even divine authority, as the orthodox hypothesis
of inspiration would give to his words, there is abso-
lutely no ground at all for the assumption that,
hecauBe he forbade women to affront public oppro-
brium by preaching when women lived habitually

200 . THE FITNESS OF WOMEN

shut up, each in her gynaeeeum^ he would likewise
have forbidden them to offer religious exhortations
in a sacred place, when public sentiment has become
reconciled to their appearance in the streets, on the
stage, in the lecture-room, and even on the platform.
The coolness, indeed, wherewith the most orthodox
persons always do practically take for granted that
Scriptural precepts, however rigid in form and seem-
ingly intended by their authors for perpetual observ-
ance, are to be set aside without scruple, as applying
to a bygone state of things, when they do not chime
in with their own inclinations and prejudices, is
only to be paralleled by the tenacity wherewith they
maintain their authority under every vicissitude,
when they happen to coincide with them. Let any
one who quotes St. Paul's incidental remark about
women speaking in church be called on to avow
how far he has taken to heart the solemn decree
issued in the Encyclical Letter of the one great
Council of the assembled apostles, in the awfully
mysterious words, "It seemed good unto the Holy
Ghost and to us^^ (as if these were two separate
opinions) "to lay upon you (the GentUe world)
no greater burden than these necessary things, — to
abstain from meats offered to idols, . . . and from
things strangled, and from blood." Lives there a
modern Christian whose conscience would in the

FOR THE MINISTRY OP RELIGION. 201

smallest degree be troubled by taking the rice and
ghee from a Hindu temple, eating a rabbit strangled
in a snare, or partaking of a black-pudding or a
Bologna sausage ?

Passing now to the more reasonable reasons against
admitting women to the ministry, — the natural and
incurable disabilities, physical and mental, under
which not a few of them labor, — the answer comes
at once to hand. Those among them who are un-
fitted for the office must not undertake it, any more
than dumb or stuttering or imbecile men. There
is no more difficulty in exclusion in one case than
in ike other, though there may be a few more
persons necessarily excluded.

As to education, the case is much more serious.
Certainly, unless women can receive the same solid
and extensive training as male theological students
(rather more strict and rigid than less so), to make
up for what may have been wanting of exactness in
their girlish school-room education, the appearance
in our pulpits of a number of female heads lightly
stored with learning or logic would be to the last
degree ill-omened. But is there the smallest neces-
sity why this should be ? If the desire of a woman
to devote herself to religious work were of any
depth or worth consideration, she would not only be
willing, but crave, to pass through the severest

202 THE FITNESS OP WOMEN

studies, to fit herself to the utmost of her abilities
for so high and sacred a task ; and it is no longer an
hypothesis, but a demonstrated fact, that if women
choose to study and have the fair opportunity of
doing so, there are not a few of them capable at all
events of attaining to those levels whereon men of
the learned professions habitually take their stand.
If a few fickle or weak-minded women were to enter
as students such an institution, let us say, as Man-
chester New College, they would be very speedily
" choked off," and no more harm would be done than
by the scores of youths "plucked" at Oxford and
Cambridge, and led to change their programme of
life. Those women, on the contrary, who should
pass successfully through such an intellectual and
moral sieve, might thenceforth be very safely trusted.
Again : the fear that Religion itself might come
to be deconsidered, as a result of the deconsideration
of the sex of its ministers, must prove groundless, if,
instead of bringing a fresh element of weakness into
preaching and prayer, it should prove that (as I
shall hope presently to show) women are likely to
pour a new stream of life into what has so often
become dry and unprofitable. After all, the inner
heart of humanity honors in its very core spiritual
graces, over the physical, the intellectual, and even
the moral. Not the conquerors, not the philoso-

FOR THE MINISTRY OP RELIGION. 203

phers, not even those who have displayed most
virtue apart from religion, have been adored and
deified among men, but the prophets and saints who
have ascended the mountain-peaks of Prayer and
thrown open the windows of Heaven.

Now, as we look back over the Christian centuries
during which the spiritual, God-loving, anti-carnal
impulse sent forth from Judaea has passed on, trans-
mitted in waves of emotion from age to age and
land to land, does it not seem probable that among
those who have received it most fully, and might
have helped its transmission most effectually, there
have been thousands of women? In effect, history
notoriously shows that, in the apostolic time and
at the period of the conversion of Europe, at least
half the work achieved was due to the ardor where-
with noble ladies not a few took up the task
of introducing and disseminating Christian ideas
through courts and camps. But, when the age for
this kind of female patronage was over, the powers
of women to aid the cause which so many of them
have had next to their innermost hearts have been
narrowed within the walls of the home or even of
the cloister. I do not doubt that this home in-
fluence of women has indeed been incalculably great
and beneficent. It is hard to conceive what would
be the sort of religion remaining in an island colo-

204 THE FITNESS OF WOMEN

iiized by men only, and with a population recruited
only by boys too young to remember a mother's
care. The chances might lie between a society of
Trappists, or a herd such as the gold-diggers of a
"Roaring Camp" in a Californian gulch. But,
because the religious influence of women in their
homes has been inestimably beneficial, is it, I ask,
any reason for resting satisfied that they should ex-
ercise no such influence outside their doors ? Surely
there might have been prevision of just such a state
of things as has existed now for more than a thou-
sand years in Christendom, in the warning of the
great Founder of Christianity that a light (when we
are so happy as to possess a light) should be set on
a candlestick and not under a bushel. If ever the
time comes when the spiritual home influence of
women is allowed to radiate into the outer circle of
public life, there is every reason to believe that the
inestimable element of spirituality will make itself
felt, touching the hearts of men with new softness,
awakening their consciences with the power of
mother-like gentleness, and inspiring quite a new
reverence, alike for women and for religion.

" Ah ! " it will be said, " this is all very well, if
women should, by some happy chance, succeed well
as preachers and ministers. If, on the contrary, they
fail, and make a miserable fiasco of their attempt,

FOR THE MINISTRY OF RELIGION. 205

what ridicule will they not draw on the most sacred
things ! Is it wise, is it allowable, to incur such a
risk?"

Feeling a good deal of sympathy with such an
alarm as this, having a terror (possibly exaggerated)
of some day undergoing the frightful experience of
listening, in a place of worship from which I could
not decently escape, to the ignorant, shallow, dog-
matic folly which it has been my occasional penance
to hear from women elsewhere, and which has,
undoubtedly, a character of its own still more ig-
norant, more shallow, and more dogmatic than any
folly commonly to be heard from men, I here humbly
confess that for many years such a possibility has
with me almost outweighed the actual probability
that women would in general fulfil the duties of the
ministry exceptionally well. But longer reflection
has tended much to remove my fears, while it has
strengthened my hopes. In the first place, I look
with extreme confidence to such a sifting process as
a good theological college course would inevitably
effect, to exclude from concurrence all the frivolous,
the half-hearted, the weak-minded, — all those women,
in short, who should not prove capable of strong
and steady mental labor, and willing to undergo it
for several consecutive years. From such as should
pass triumphantly through an ordeal of this kind,

206 THE FITNESS OP WOMEN

nothing very outrageous in the way of folly or con-
temptible in the way of feminine " twaddle " would
need to be apprehended. And, again, there is a
second and very satisfactory ground for reassurance.
Female ministers will certainly not (at all events
for a very long time to come) be appointed to
lecture us by any despotic authority. They cannot,
indeed, be ministers at all, unless some of us dis-
tinctly desire them to minister for our particular
benefit. By a happy decree of fate, it takes at least
two or three persons at any time to form a congre-
gation. There must be the hearers of the discourse
as well as the speaker; and, as even the sternest
sticklers for the rights of women are not likely to
proceed so far as to demand compulsory attendance
at female preachments, there will always remain
open a door of hope and refuge whereby the op-
pressed may go free. The same argument applies
in this case as to the everlastingly reproduced fallacy
about the franchise ; namely, that, if their political
disabilities be removed, women will invade the
benches of St. Stephen's. As nobody can ever be
elected an M.P., unless he or she find a majority of
some constituency to choose him or her as the best
candidate, so neither can anybody become a min-
ister in one of the free churches, unless he or she
find a congregation ready to ''sit under" him or

FOB THE MINISTRY OF RELIGION. 207

her, as a tolerable preacher. In either case, the
woman who could so singularly impress the majority
of electors * or of parishioners with the conviction
of her supreme fitness as to induce them to choose
her for the political or religious oflBce would be,
undoubtedly, so very remarkable a person that it
would be ten thousand pities the world should be
deprived of her services.

Let us now turn to the other side of the shield.
Having discussed the validity of the arguments
against the admission of women to the ministry, let
us see what is to be said directly in favor of such an
innovation.

In the first place, it is obvious that women have
certain special aptitudes and qualifications (as well
as the above-named inaptitudes) for such an office.
We have been hitherto speaking as if the work of
a minister lay almost exclusively in the pulpit and
reading-desk; but we must remember that a very
large and very important part of it lies also in the
homes of the members of the congregation, in the
hour of their sorrows and difficulties, their sick-
nesses, doubts, repentances, death. Can any one
doubt that the tender and ready sympathies of

•In the ease of the M.P.y this would need to be a majority of men,
seeiiig that the whole female contingent of qualified yoters will only (tf
admitted) add ahout a fifth or sixth to the register.

208 THE FITNESS OP WOMEN

women, and their superior tact and discernment of
character, their natural tendency to soothe and ex-
hort rather than to upbraid or threaten, are quali-
ties more valuable for such service than any which
men, however pious, well-meaning, and learned in
casuistry, usually bring to such tasks ? As a matter
of fact, women do, instinctively, perform the office
of ministering angels on these occasions all over the
land, without waiting for any license or consecra-
tion; while many of the best of the clergy either
suffer all their days from unconquerable shyness
and the sense of their own want of tact, or run
speedily into the ruts of professional consolations
and exhortations in formal phraseology, meaning
little or nothing to speaker or hearer. Of all the
irritating — I might say maddening — things in
human life, there is nothing worse than to be ad-
dressed in the hour of mortal agony and despair,
when our hearts, riven to the core, could scarcely
bear an angel's touch, by a smug, self-satisfied person-
age, who inflicts on us his cut-and-dried consolations
and exhortations to perfect quiescence and cheerful
resignation; all the time revealing, by every word
and gesture, how utterly incapable he is of compre-
hending even the shadow of our grief. It would be
difficult to estimate how many people (especially the
intelligent men of the humbler classes, who are the

rOB THE MTNISTBY OP RELIGION. 209

principal victims of these tormentors), — men who
would have suffered themselves to be led with
childlike submission by any wise and loving hand,
even through the wicket-gate of prayer and repent-
ance, to the heavenly way, — have been, on the
contrary, goaded by tactless parsons into hardness
and rebellion. It is real, genuine, spontaneous
sympathy which alone can authorize any one to
approach the sacred borders of a great sorrow. Can
any one doubt that women would, as a general rule,
feel this more tenderly, more genuinely than men?
The fear would be that the strain on the heart of a
good woman, minister of a large- congregation, would
be so great as very sensibly to tell upon health and
life.

Further, outside the region of sentiment, and even
in the intellectual way, so far as it concerns social
influence, a woman has special facilities. If she
have extensive knowledge (and I am presuming she
will have acquired a good deal before entering the
ministry), it will generally be more ready to hand
than that of a man. Her humor, if she possesses a
grain of that precious quality, will have the great
advantage, in all wordy skirmishing, of being play-
ful, quick as lightning, and always at command, —
not like the ponderous satire which takes an hour to
get out of its sheath, or the peculiarly masculixae
type of wit which the owaer —

210 THE FITNESS OP WOMBIST

" Beareth not about,
As if afraid to use it ont.
Except on holiday? or so,
As men their best apparel do."

Her logic — if by happy circumstance she has really
trained her mind to work logically — will not lose
the famous feminine faculty for springing to the top
of the stairs while the man is steadily walking up
the steps, because she has acquired the power of rec-
ognizing whether she be on the right landing or the
wrong.

Regarding the rhetorical faculties of women, I
may first remark that, by a well-known law of
acoustics, a female voice will, if equally strong,
reach further and be audible more clearly at a dis-
tance than that of a man; and, for some kinds of
eloquence, at all events, its softer and purer tones
will probably find their way most easily to the heart.
What her actual powers of oratory may be is one of
the problems of the future; but the experience of
feminine public speaking during the last few years
seems to point to a curious but not inexplicable fact,
— namely, that, given the same ideas^ a woman will
generally express them more easily than a man, at
least than an Englishman. This gift of facile and
appropriate expression is obviously one dependent
on a special faculty of the brain (the loss of which

FOB THE MINISTBY OP BELIQION. 211

constitutes aphasia)^ and is very variously distrib-
uted among races, and also, I think, between the
sexes. Oratory, which is dependent upon it for its
machinery, as a pianist on his fingering, is prover-
bially rare among men of our nation, though, when
it does exist, it seems to reach sometimes to the
climax of power and grandeur. 'Englishwomen^ on
the contrary (so far as we yet may guess), possess
more often the ready-wordedness, the fluency and
verve of speech, of the Celt or the Italian. Either
the feminine nervous temperament is favorable to
this faculty, or (as I would rather imagine to be the
case) the root of the difference lies in the region of
sentiment, and women speak more fluently because
they are more apt to be carried away by interest in
their subject or sympathy with their audience. The
dread of making himself ridiculous by stammering,
by talking injudiciously, or making a mistake of
any kind, is so deeply ingrained in the mind of the
ordinary English gentleman that, if one — not a
barrister or clergyman, and consequently not inured
to the sound of his own voice — be called on sud-
denly to return thanks at a wedding-breakfast, he
will, nine times out of ten, stutter and hum-and-
haw, and, after putting every one on thorns, will
end by making some extraordinarily malapropos
joke, like the celebrated one of I^ord Feenix in

212 THB PITNBSS Of WOMEN

Dombey and Son, Or, if he be aware overnight
that he will be called on to address his own tenants
on the morrow, his slumbers will be considerably-
less sound than if he had been warned he must go
out and fight a duel at sixteen paces. As to an
Englishman taking kindly to public speaking when
advanced in life, so miraculous an event, I believe,
is scarcely on record.

Nearly the contrary of all this holds true as
regards women. Those among them who are will-
ing to speak in public seem to be carried away the
moment they begin by feelings which leave little
room for self-reflection, whatever pangs of shyness
and diffidence they may have endured beforehand.*
But is it not very superfluous to expatiate on the
special gifts of speech assigned by nature to woman-
kind, since in all ages their proneness to over-exert
them has been the theme of jest and satire, and at
no very remote date hostelries were adorned by the
sign of the " Good Woman," meaning a woman with
no tongue; penal laws were in force against the

* This at least is the impression left on me by the female speakers (some
twenty perhaps) whom I have chanced to hear. I never knew one of them
" hum " or " haw," or stammer, or break down, even when (as in one very
remarkable case) the gentle and learned speaker had never addressed an
audience till the occasion, when she had already passed middle life.
Among the most remarkable phenomena of the present day, I reckon the
preaching of Mrs, Qooth, the wife of tlie General of the Salra^on Axm^,

FOB THE MIOTSTRY OF EBLIGION. 218

creature (now happily classified among the Extinct
Mammalia), the Common Scold ; and even tomb-
stones were enlivened by a sort of dig at the sleeper
beneath, as in. the case of the celebrated Arabella
Young, whose death is specified as the date when she
"began to hold her tongue"? Perhaps it is not
unjust to entertain the suspicion that masculine wit
may sometimes have proved rather tardy in parrying
the thrusts of that "little member," which we all
know is sharpened in so terrible a furnace, and that
the ponderous sarcasms recorded against its misuse
may be likened to the boulder-stones thrown by
Polyphemus after the retreating and exultant
Greeks.

Joke or no joke, it is quite certain that women
are even exceptionally endowed with several, if not
all, of the qualities necessary to oratory. The origi-
nality and depth of their ideas and the culture they
have received may in many cases be open questions ;
but there can be no doubt at all that, when they
have got the ideas, they will find out remarkably
well how to express them.

It is time now to pass to the graver part of our
subject, — the value which may attach to women's

The combination of fervent zeal with practical good sense in her extern •
pore disconrses must be admired eren by those who differ most widely

214 THE FITNESS OP WOHEK

thoughts about Religion; for, if that value be
trifling, it will be all the more unfortunate, should
they possess any facilities for imposing them upon us
by wordy fluency, — that " fatal fluency " which the
best men in America have deplored as among the
gifts of their countrymen.

Thoughts of the class which are properly ex-
pressed in pulpits are, of course, of various kinds.
There are thoughts which are purely reflections and
speculations of the intellect on critical and philo-
sophical problems, and which an able lawyer, an
acute critic, or a profound metaphysician can make
as well, or better, than a prophet or a saint ; nay, in
which a Mephistopheles might excel a Tauler. It
is no doubt sometimes necessary (though surely by
no means so frequently as some preachers seem to
take for granted) to offer thoughts of this class to
a congregation, and, in short, to read out in church
an article which minus the text might have ap-
peared in a Review. If it be a very lofty and relig-
ious mind from which such thoughts emanate, they
will of course possess an elevating power propor-
tioned to the momentum of such a mind brought to
bear on ordinary intellects. To be lifted by sermons
of this class into the serene and purified atmosphere
of noble speculation will of itself effect a quasi-
religious result, independently of any conviction of

FOR THE MINISTEY OF RELIGION. 216

theological truths which may or may not be brought
away. The hearers who have followed for half an
hour the upward flight of one of these eagle souls
will return to the petty concerns, interests, pleasures,
anxieties of common life, calmed and ennobled, and
able to see all things in more just proportions. On
the other hand, if the preacher be merely a clever
critic or metaphysician, who deals with sacred
themes as a counsel with the case in ' his brief,
the result of his sermons, however brilliant and
interesting they may be found by an intellectual
audience, and triumphantly satisfactory to those
who find their cherished opinions clinched by his
arguments, will be the reverse of religious. The
listeners will go away, not awed and calmed, but
eager for controversy and confirmed in self-con-
fidence, having lost any benefit which they might
have derived from the previous acts of worship.
They have been made to rise from their knees to sit
down instantly in the seat of the critical, always
very closely contiguous to that of the scornful.

Of this intellectual and theoretical class of ser-
mons it is not to be anticipated that women will
preach many. I should rather say that one of the
good things which may be hoped from the introduc-
tion of women into the ministry may prove to be
the falling out of fashion of a class of discourses

216 THE FITNESS OF WOMBK

which can only be beneficial or desirable in the case
of exceptional mental greatness, combined with a
piety warm and powerful enough to hallow every
region of thought into which it may pass.

Again, there is an order of thought more practical
than this, and surely more suitable to form the
sequel of a service of prayer; namely, ideas con-
cerning duty in all its forms, religious, social, and
personal. It is amazing, considering the place which
Christianity in every phase assigns to obedience to
the will of God, how exceedingly small a space
lessons and discussions concerning what is that
Divine Will, as regards every-day conduct, ever take
in Christian instruction. We are eternally exhorted
to repent ; but what are the sins and failures which
ought to be included in our penitence, few preachers
take the pains to inform us. We are exhorted to
"renounce the devil and all his works"; but what
those "works" may be, as distinguished from works
of righteousness in the shop, the camp, the bar, the
exchange, the interior of our homes, we are left to
find out for ourselves. Sermons treating carefully
and thoughtfully any subject of the kind are among
the most rare of clerical addresses. Bishop South
confesses, indeed, that two-thirds of Christianity are
a Christian temper. But how many times have any
of us heard rebuked from the pulpit that odious

FOB THE MINISTRY OF RELIGION. 217

sullenness which makes the unhappy inmates of the
same home with the sulky person live in a perpetual
November, or yet the despotic violence and anger
which threaten them like a perpetual thunder-storm
brewing in the distance? What master of a house-
hold is told, by the only man who dare tell him,
that his tyranny, his harshness, perhaps his cruelty,
exercised hourly on wife or child or any luckless
dependant, make up a sum total of misery to them
and of offence on his part, worse than the results of
many a sudden crime, and certainly involving no
less guilt? What wife and mother is told that her
selfishness, her bickerings, her discontent, her spite-
fulnesses, are sins for which no prate of high relig-
ious feeling or incessant fussing about church-going
can possibly atone? And, again, as regards other
offences, — let us say, lying and dishonesty, — when
have we heard wise and just definitions of them
from our pastors, or fitting exhortations to nobler
standards of veracity and probity than are common
in the world? In the upper classes of society, a
certain slipshod rule of thumb on these subjects is
pretty generally received. But where did we learn
it? Certainly not when we occupied our seats in
church, but rather at the dinner-table, in the play-
ground at school, at the club, or in the drawing-room.
Among the lower ranks, where this traditional code,

218 THE FITNESS OP WOMEN

of honor rather than of morality, does not hold
equal sway, the ignorance which prevails concern-
ing the very rudimentary principles of truth and
probity is often no less startling than deplorable.
The neglect of the clergy of all denominations to
draw clear definitions on these matters of hourly
concern, so that their flocks may at least know what
is right, supposing they are so fortunate as to be
able to inspire them with a resolution to do it when
known, is of a piece with the indiflference of all the
churches to moral heresies of the most soul-debasing
kind, while they punish to the utmost of their
powers the faintest divergence from theological
orthodoxy.

I cannot but think that, if women now enter the
pulpit, a great many more sermons will be preached
dealing with these points of practical ethics. The
concrete and the personal wUl probably always
possess keener interest for the majority of women
than the abstract, the vague and the universal ; and
there is, moreover, if I mistake not, a very distinct
superiority in the womanly propensity to translate
ideas into action, over the man-of-the-world habit of
admitting high and rigid principles in theory, while
practising quite other rules in commerce, politics, and
social affairs. A very eminent thinker and scholar,
a leader of thought at Oxford, once remarked to me

^ FOB THE MINISTRY OF BELIGIOK. 219

with characteristic simplicity, " I do not know how
to account for the fact, but I notice that, when a
good woman is convinced that something is true or
right, she tries immediately in some way to square
her beliefs and conduct accordingly ; whereas when
I have, perhaps by infinite labor, succeeded in con-
vincing a man of the same thing, he goes on just as
he did before, without altering his behavior a jot,
and as if nothing had happened I " Now, I think
this practical tendency of the feminine nature
(though it will perhaps be less marked hereafter
when women submit more generally to the friction
of contact with many minds) will inevitably show
itself in a preference for the inculcation of definite
duties rather than for the vague declamations about
repentance and regeneration which so often leave
their hearers perfectly undisturbed and on the high
way (as they think) to heaven, leading lives of
odious selfishness, and combining profit and piety
after the fashion of the celebrated grocer, " Sand the
sugar, John — and then come in to prayers."

It has been, often remarked that the most pro-
found difference between modern and classical civ-
ilization lies in the contrast between the value
attached by each to private morals. The virtue of
the individual was of old treated as altogether sub-
ordinate in importance to the interests of the State.

220 THB FITKESS OF WOMEK

In our time, we have almost come to recognize that
states and churches — nay, society itself — exist for
the sake of building up individual souls to their
perfection ; and there is every reason to expect that
this sense of the supreme importance of morals over
every other human concern will rather increase than
dwindle through all time to come.

Now, it would certainly appear that this Hebraism^
as Mr. Arnold calls it, is rather characteristic of the
higher sort of women. The moment a woman rises
above the passion for personal admiration and the
struggle for petty social ambition or sordid matri-
monial scheming, to which so large a number of
unhappy ones are trained and consigned from girl-
hood, on the principle of " keeping women in their
proper sphere," — the moment, I say, that a woman
has been lifted by education or her natural force of
character above all this frivolity and baseness, we
almost invariably find in her a degree of earnestness
about ethical and ethico-religious questions which is
far more rarely traceable among men. It is true
that her exclusion from a great many fields of mas-
culine interest naturally centres her thoughts more
on such subjects, and that, when those exclusions are
more or less removed, we must expect to see more
frequently women absorbed in the same worldly
interests as men, and perhaps some who now think

FOB THE MINISTBY OF BJfiLXGION. 231

night and day of a ball will be equally eager about
a bill in Parliament. Still, I believe that, inde-
pendently of circumstances, women have a special
tendency (as Renan avers of the Celtic race) to
" long after the infinite," and to yearn to bring an
element of sacredness and nobleness into the transac-
tions of daily life such as their moral aspect alone
affords. I believe that nine women out of ten (of
the better sort, of whom I have spoken) would, if
they had the choice, oftener speak of duty and
religion than of any other themes.* If this be so,
it would follow that, as time goes on, instead of
women falling behind in the progress of humanity,
that progress will constantly tend to bring women
more to the front as students and expounders of
morality.

There is another aspect of this matter also, which
fairly deserves consideration. Many good Christians
have remarked that, while they would fain take
Jesus Christ as their " Great Exemplar," they find
nothing in his life indicating what his example

• A curlouB illustration of this is to be found in a passage in the first
series of Mrs. Kemble's charming autobiography published three years
ago. She describes the late Lady Byron as often expressing enyy of her
(Mrs. Kemble's) public readings, and her longing to have similar crowds
in sympathy with her own impressions. ** I made her laugh/' says Mrs.
Kemble, "by telling her that more than once, when looking from my
readin^-desli; oyer t|ie sea of faces upllfte4 tow|ur4 me, a sudden f eeUng

THB FITHE88 OF WOMBK

would have been in the very closest and most im-
portant of human relations of husband or father.
Surely there is no less reason for women to be
conscious of a lacune in their moral instructions,
when they are received exclusively either from
mothers and governesses who may be utterly unfit
for such an office, and who often merely pass on
traditional moral heresies, or else from masculine
pastors whose whole moral parallax is necessarily
different from that of a woman, and who practically
know next to nothing of the trials, temptations, and
duties of her lot. We have had of recent years in
many of our churches, and notably in St. Paul's
Cathedral, courses of sermons addressed by various
clergymen to men alone, from which women have
been rigidly excluded. Would it be too much to
hope that some time or other, in some himible
chapel (since no one would dream of devoting the
national religious edifices to the exclusive use of
women for a single hour), women may enjoy the
privilege of being especially addressed by pastors

liad seized me that I must say somethlng/rom mfyuHf to all those human
beings whose attention I felt at that moment entirely at my command,
and between whom and myself a sense of sympathy thrilled powerfully
and strangely through my heart as I looked steadfastly at them before
opening my lips ; but that on wondering afterwards what I might, oould,
would, or should hare said to them from myself, I never could think of
anything but two words -* < Be gooA ! ' ** (Page 3170

FOB THE MIKISTBY OF BELIGION. 228

of their own sex, who may talk to them at once
with cultured minds and experienced hearts?

And, lastly, besides the Intellectual and the Moral
classes of thoughts to be offered from the pulpit,
there is a third, — of which, alas ! we know far too
little, — the Spiritual. The store of this latter class
of thoughts is probably extremely small even in
minds of richest experience. They seem rather to
distil slowly in precious drops from the wounds in
the tree of life than to be capable of manufacture
by the help of culture and reflection. They are the
thoughts which concern the baseness, the. loathsome-
ness, the misery of sin (felt and considered as Sin^
not as Error or Vice), the glory and beauty and joy
of Holiness, felt as SoUness^ not as Prudence or
Virtue. They teach the laws of our spiritual exist-
ence ; the hygienics of the soul ; the " Way toward
the Blessed Life." In some sense, sermons which
contain thoughts like these may be called Moral
Discourses ; for they touch the very springs of our
moral nature, and send us forth heart-smitten for
the past, heart-strengthened with resolutions for the
future. They are the most powerful moral levers
which human agency ever applies to our souls. But
they are the reverse of didactic, ethical disquisitions,
or expositions of the detailed code of virtue. They
lie in another region of feeling and appeal to another

224 THE FITKASS OF WOMEN

class of our faculties than the ratiocinatiye. We do
not sit and judge them, but they come from aboye
and judge us. When they strike us most forcibly,
we neyer feel the temptation (as we are so often
inclined to do at the best bits in the critical or
the moral discourse) to express our approbation by
the familiar tokens of public applause. On the con-
trary, it is our own breasts we are fain to beat;
while, if our lips move, it is to murmur the prayer
of the publican.

Will women preach sermons of this order and
filled with thoughts like these ? It is impossible to
foretell with certainty ; yet here, if anywhere, may
we expect to find the special gifts of women brought
out at last from their hidden treasuries. It has been
said of almost every great spiritual teacher that
there has been something feminine in his nature,
something more of tenderness and purity, more of
insight into and sympathy with others, than belongs
to lesser men. In Jesus Christ, the ideal characters
of both sexes seem almost equally blended. Of
course there are other qualities besides the charac-
teristically feminine ones needed to form the highest
kind of religious teacher; but the sterner qualities
are no more invariably deficient in women than are
the softer ones always lacking in men, and it seems
the reverse of improbable thg,t women may arise

FOB THE MINI8TBY OF BELIGION. 226

uniting both in hitherto almost unexampled degree.
Let us remember that, after all, the one great
Force of the spiritual world — its correlated Gravita-
tion, Light, Electricity, Magnetism, and Vital Force,
all in one — is pure Divine LovB. This alone, radi-
ating from the Sun of Love in the heavens, moves
and vivifies the soul ; and to it alone it responds as
the flower to the orb of day — we know not how.
The human spirit which receives from on high
the largest influx of this divine light and warmth
thereby becomes a focus of reflected power and
fervor for all those who can be brought into spiritual
contact with it. It is the "love of God shed abroad"
in the heart, — the love of that goodness which God
is, and for which man is made, whose germs even
now the illumined eye of love discerns deep-latent
in every human soul, — in a word, the love of God
and love of man, in whose might all spiritual miracles
are done, all leprous souls cleansed, all demon pas-
sions cast out, all blind eyes opened, all maimed and
crippled faculties made whole. If we could but find
the most profoundly-loving, the most unselfishly,
nobly, purely loving of men or women now living
upon earth, and set him or her in the midst of us to
be our teacher, our friend, our guide into the ways
of peace and blessedness, we should have gained a
help better than all the philosophers and theologians.

226 THE FITNESS OF WOMEN

the monks and the hermits, could ever give. I will
not take on myself to affirm that such most loving
heart beats in a woman's breast. It may well be
that there are men as tender in feeling as any
mother whose spirit ever yearned over her infant's
cradle. But there is at least an equal chance of a
woman's supremacy, and almost a certainty that, on
a secondary level of loving-kindness and unselfish-
ness, we should find many more women than men.
It is quite impossible, I think, that this difference
should not make itself felt, and a new impulse be
made to flow through all the channels of spiritual
life whenever the influence of women may be
brought to bear directly and largely on the religious
feelings of the community.

Lastly, and chiefly. It is a truism to say that the
character of our religion depends on our idea of
God ; but who has taken note of this familiar fact
sufficiently to recognize that all the traditional part
of that solemn idea has come to us uniformly in a
way deplorably one-sided, and that side the least lov-
able ? I do not overestimate the importance of any
idea of God which comes to us through our fellow-
meu. It seems to me that, from the first dawn of
the religious life, the child has a dim sense (apart
from his teacher's lessons) of some beneficent and
righteous Power around and within him ; and that

FOR THE MINISTEY OF RELIGION. 227

when the Sun rises on any soul in the awful hour
which saints have likened to a new birth, there is
obtained, even through all the mists of earth, a
direct vision of the ineffable glory, which evermore
causes the words of other mortals, and even the
man's own attempt to render in language his sense
of that great Love and Holiness, to seem unreal and
worse than inadequate. When that stage is reached,
it is probably of little consequence what a man's
pastor may tell him about God's character. All he
says is only like a book whioh describes a person we
ourselves have known or a place we have visited.
Nobody can make the man believe (at least so long
as his own living faith and open vision endure) that
the Being whom he meets in the hour of prayer is
less than All-good, unutterably Holy, even though
the dogmas he accepts practically attribute to him
a totally different character. The only injury he can
suffer is a negative one : he is denied the help and
sympathy which he needs, and which it is the proper
office of his minister to supply to him. But at an
earlier stage, when all religious experience is yet
vague and dim, when faith must of necessity be pro-
visional and taken on trust at second hand, — at that
period there can be no question of the misfortune of
receiving cold, hard, narrow notions about God, in-
stilled by teachers who themselves have little love or

228 THE FITNBSS OF WOMEN

no direct spiritual knowledge, and have chiefly bor-
rowed their ideas from the confessedly imperfect
rendering, age after age, of other men's experience.
How is a young soul ever to turn to God, when God
is represented to it as One from whom it would far
more naturally turn away ? And let it be remem-
bered that the attributes of God which call out the
spontaneous love and adoration of the heart are pre-
cisely those whose meaning is most completely lost
and evaporated in the dry formtdaries of the intel-
lect, and can never be truly conveyed except by one
whose own heart responds to them through all its
depths. Power, Wisdom, Justice, are divine charac-
teristics, of which the meaning may be indicated by
any teacher with a clear head and command of lan-
guage. But I disbelieve that any one who is not
himself full of love and tenderness has ever, since
the world began, yet transmitted to another soul the
truth that God is Love.

There is little to wonder at, after all, in the
mournful fact that the religion which as it rose from
the heart of Christ was supremely the religion of
Divine Love became, as the centuries went by,
colder and harder and more cruel, till the irony was
complete, and the doctrine of the Mount of Galilee
was illustrated by the fires of the Spanish Inquisi-
tion. Who, we may ask, were the teachers of

FOR THE MINISTRY OF RELIGION. 229

Christianity during the intervening ages? Who
were they through whose lips and writings the
lessons gathered from the lilies and the sparrows,
and the story of the Prodigal, were transmitted to
each new-bom generation ? They were msn^ exclu-
sively men; nay, men who, in taking their office,
renounced those ties of natural affection through
which the Author of Nature has caused the human
heart to grow tender, and to be taught the practice
of unselfishness. To fit themselves to convey to
the hearts of their brethren the gospel of the Father-
hood of God, they began by renouncing the experi-
ence of human fatherhood Tor themselves. The
Apostolic Succession, of which the great Churches
still boast, was for fifteen centuries a school for the
transmission of ideas about a Divine Parent down
a long chain of childless celibates. We Protestants
have corrected this mistake, and the men who tell to
us the story of the Prodigal are at least able to
speak out of the abundance of their hearts when
they say that, ^4ike as a father pitieth his children,
so the Lord hath mercy on them that fear Him."
But is there not one step even further to be taken ?
Is not the compassion of ^^ a mother for the son of
her womb " a still profounder image of the Divine
Love than the father's pity? Ought it not also to
be brought home to our comprehensions (if in any

230 THE FITNESS OP WOMEN

measure human words may so bring it) through the
lips of mothers and motherly-hearted women ?

The loss out of our religion of all those ideas
which may be classed as the doctrine of the mother-
hood of God has been attended with evils innumer-
able. The Church of Rome, in obedience to a
vehement popular instinct, has sought to make
up for the defect by Mariolatry. The orthodox
Protestant Churches, by sternly adhering to their
masculine Trinity, have indeed preserved the awe
and moral reverence which the Divine Kingship
and Fatherhood demand, and which the paganism
of virgin worship has obliterated. But how much
have they not lost by excluding those sentiments
which can only be given to One in whom we recog-
nize not only justice, holiness, and beneficence, but
also tenderness, sympathy, love? The truth is we
are so constituted that great benefits received, — if
we think of them as bestowed merely because it is
right and good to give them, and not from love for
ourselves, — so far from awakening in us spontane-
ous emotions of gratitude, have rather an opposite
tendency, and seem to lay on us an obligation to be
grateful, which is a sort of burden, and from which
all minds save the most generous have a proclivity
to escape. To hundreds of us, large donations
from just and well-meaning but unaffectionate

FOB THE MINISTRY OF RELIGION. 231

fathers have failed to waken the smallest throb of
genuine gratefulness; while some mere trifle given
by a loving mother — a flower from a well-remem-
bered rose-tree, a scrap of her needlework — has
filled our eyes with tears. In excluding, then, in
a great degree from view that which I may pre-
sume to call the maternal side of religion, the
Churches, so far as they have done it, have
dropped the golden chain whereby human hearts
may be drawn, and have kept in their hands the
iron one which can only control the reason and the
conscience. Is it possible to estimate the amount
of loss to religion which this signifies, or how many
thousands of souls might have been won by love to
a life of piety and holiness who have refused to obey
the bit and bridle of sterner motives, and have wan-
dered off and been lost in the wilderness of practical
atheism ?

If there be, then, as I humbly believe and trust,
in the nature of our great Parent above, certain
characters of tenderness and sympathy with. His
creatures which are more perfectly shadowed, more
vividly reflected, in the love of human mothers for
their children than by aught else on earth ; if there
be, in short, a real meaning in the old lesson that
God created woman as well as man in His own
image, — the image being only complete in the com-

282 THE ITTNESB OF WOMBW FOB THE MINISTBY.

plete humanity, — then I think it follows that there
is urgent need that woman's idea of God should
have its due place in all our teaching of religion.
I think that there must be truths in this direction
which only a woman's heart will conceive and only
a woman's lips can teach, — truths, perchance, which
have come to her when baby-fingers have clung
round her neck in the dark while infant trust over-
came infant terror, and she has asked herself was
there anything in heaven or earth which could make
her cast down to destruction, or even let slip from
her clasp of care and guardianship, the helpless little
child thus lying in her arms, — a living parable of all
our race in the everlasting arms of God.

THE HOUSE ON THE SHORE OF ETERNITY.

THE HOUSE ON THE SHORE OF ETERNITY.

AN ALLEGOEY.

Two SIMPLB-MINDBD men, wIk) had dwelt all their
lives in a country far inland, at last undertook a
long journey together. This happened many ages
ago, when there were no such things as printed
books or village schools, and when the people in
isolated districts saw no travellers, and knew noth-
ing of the great world beyond the hills which closed
their horizon.

Wolfgang and Athelstane, so our pilgrims were
called, walked on over downs and heaths, and
through the vast forests of oak which then over-
spread the land, till at last, after a night's toilsome
march, they came, in the early dawn, to a spot
which seemed to them the strangest they had ever
visited. Walls of rock shut out any distant view ;
but immediately before them on a gentle declivity
there stood a structure, much larger than the humble
cottages which Wolfgang and Athelstane had in-

THE HOUSE OK THE

habited, and of a singularly different form. Instead
of a pointed roof of thatch or tiles, there was, on
the top, a flat floor of boards ; while beneath, where
there should have been a solid square foundation,
there was a long thin wedge, almost like a roof
which had been reversed and turned downward.
Also, through the floor rose up two long, slender,
tree-like erections, with all the branches carefully
smoothed away. Crossbars were slung on these
poles, and ropes connected them together; while a
great roll of coarse woven stuff, like sackcloth, lay
folded up beside them. At one end, and outside of
the wooden structure, hung a huge beam, standing,
as it seemed, in some unaccountable relation to the
rest of the fabric, and connected with it by machinery
passing into the interior. All these singular things
were slowly and carefully noted by our two humble
travellers, as they walked round the wooden build-
ing in the morning twilight. No one was near
who could afford them an explanation of the use
or purpose of what they saw ; and their doubts and
wonder grew every moment.

"What can it mean?" said Wolfgang. "What
did the builder — whoever he can have been —
intend by such a mansion as this ? "

"It is clear enough," answered Athelstane,
thoughtfully, "that it is the work of some very

8H0BB OF ETEBKmr. 287

ingenious hands. How soundly and skilfully it is
all fitted together I "

" True," replied his comrade ; " and yet ought we
to say it is well made before we can teU for what
purpose it is constructed? To me it seems that our
own old huts of wattled willow and turf were, after
aU, of a better shape for a house to stand on the
ground."

"Do you think this is a house, only a house?"
said Athelstane, suddenly looking up.

" Well, if it be not a house, what else can it be ? "
said Wolfgang. " Let us try to look inside of it,
and examine it more closely."

The two men soon contrived to enter the edifice
which so puzzled them; and presently Wolfgang
exclaimed triiunphantly : —

"See! there can be no question more on the
matter. This is only a house. Here are seats and
tables for men to sit at, and beds for them to sleep
in ; and here is a fire-place and a great iron pot to
cook food. Now, you can have no hesitation. It is
just a wooden house, and rather stupidly planned."

"I have no doubt," said Athelstane, "that it is
intended for a habitation ; but is it not inexplicable
that a builder who can work so cleverly should con-
struct it so unsuitably for a common house ? Why
is it not made to stand squarely and steadily on the

288 THE HOUSB OK THE

ground? What is the sense of these long soaring
poles standing up through the middle, with the coils
of ropes and bales of sacking ? And this ? This is
the most mysterious thing of all," said Athelstane,
placing his hand on a wheel, which instantly stirred
the great beam at the back.

"They are strange certainly," replied Wolfgang,
— "very strange and useless things, I should say,
about a house which would be much more comfort-
able and answer its purpose better without them.
I cannot agree with you that the builder was
really a clever man, or knew what he was about,
else he would never have erected those poles or
made that senseless, upside-down roof, instead of a
foundation; or, above all, have constructed that
totally unmeaning apparatus behind the whole
structure."

"I differ from you," said Athelstane, after some
moments more of reflection. " I think it is we who
are not clever or ingenious, and who cannot find out
what the carpenter who made this building intends
to do with it. I do not believe that singular form
beneath (so little fit for a building only intended for
a house), nor those poles and ropes and vast sheets
of woven stuff, nor yet that mysterious great beam,
were all added to a mere house for nothing, — for no
purpose whatever. I think, Wolfgang," and Athel-

SHOEB OF ETEBNITY. 289

stane laid his hand on his friend's arm earnestly, —
" I think what we are looking at is something more
than a house. I think it is not intended to stand
always where we see it.^^

" You are dreaming, Athelstane," said Wolfgang,
with a short laugh. " Where on earth should a
house go, if it is not to stand always where it is
built? Who would want to move such a structure

as this?"

"I do not know," said Athelstane, humbly. "I
do not profess to understand the mystery of it : only
I see that the master carpenter who built it must
have been a very great carpenter indeed ; and I can-
not believe that he has made all these things in vain,
or for no important purpose. If he wanted only a
house, why did he not simply build a house standing
flat on the ground, and with no shafts piercing the
air, and no vast guiding beam at the back ? Trust
me, friend Wolfgang, this is something more than
the common abode of which alone you seem able to
think."

While the two simple-minded men yet talked
together, the sun had risen, and there was a sound of
many waters and of rising waves; and through an
opening in the rocks, which the travellers had not
perceived in the twilight, the great ocean became
revealed to their eyes. Higher and higher rose the

240 THE HOUSE ON THE

tide, till it almost reached where the strange wooden
building still lay motionless; and the travellers
retreated a little up the shore, and stood, awe-struck
and breathless, watching what might happen. Then
down from the cliff above ran a band of mariners,
and leaped on board the vessel, and hauled in the
anchor ; and presently the waves lifted up the ship,
and she floated bravely on the waters. Very soon,
the mariners set the sails, which had lain idly on the
deck, the pilot placed his hand on the rudder and
guided the noble barque, and she was borne by the
winds of heaven far off beyond the uttermost ken
of the two poor travellers upon the shore.

Then, after a time, Wolfgang turned to his com-
panion, and said: "Athelstane, you spoke truth.
Yon House-of-the-Sea was made, as you foresaw, for
other use than to stand upon the ground. It was
planned for a different element, — the free world of
waters. And now we see what was the purport of
130 many things which before seemed to us useless, —
the keel, the masts, the sails, the marvellous and
mysterious rudder. How wonderful it is! How
wise and far-seeing the great carpenter who made
the ship!"

As Wolfgang spoke, Athelstane lifted his head,
which had drooped in heavy thought, and he saw
the wide ocean leaping in the morning light stretched

SHORE OP ETBBNITY. 241

out before him, and the new-risen sun smote his face
with glory. And Athelstane laid his hand on Wolf-
gang's arm, and spoke as his friend had never heard
him speak before, for it was as a man in whose soul
a great new thought had sprung to life: "Aye,
Wolfgang, aye," he said; "but if that marvellous
work of human hands was not made only for earth,
do you think we were made for nothing better than
the life which now we lead, — to eat and drink, and
marry, and toil, and sleep, and die, and be forgotten ?
Are not we too, O Wolfgang, made for other things
than these? Are we not fitted for some other ele-
ment than that in which now we have our being,
some other existence than that wliich yet we lead?
If we were intended only to live our few years of
animal life on earth and then perish, why were we
given minds to plough the seas of thought, and
aspirations to point to heaven, and love to swell
beneath the breath of affection, and conscience to
guide us on our way as the pilot lays on it his
mighty hand? O Wolfgang I we could perceive
that the ship was intended to float on the great
ocean which we had never beheld. Can we not see
that we and all our race are made to live in a world
yet unseen, wider, freer, grander a thousand times
than earth, — a world which we shall enter when-
soever the tide of death shall lift us up and bear us
away?"

THE PEAK IN DARIEN : THE RIDDLE OP
DEATH.

THEPEAKINDARIEN: THE RIDDLE OF
DEATH.

It is somewhat singular that the natural longing
to penetrate the great secret of mortality should not
have suggested to some of the inquirers into so-called
"Spiritual" manifestations that, before attempting
to obtain communication with the dead through
such poor methods as raps and alphabets, they might
more properly, and with better hope of gaining a
glimpse through the " gates ajar, " watch closely the
dying^ and study the psychological phenomena which
accompany the act of dissolution. Thus, it might
be possible to ascertain, by comparison of numerous
instances, whether among these phenomena are any
which seem to indicate that the mind, soul, or self
of the expiring person, is not undergoing a process
of extinction, but exhibiting such tokens as might
be anticipated, were it entering upon a new phase
of existence and coming into possession of fresh
faculties. It is at least conceivable that some such
in<Ucatioii3 might be obs^i:ved, were we to look for

246 THB PEAK IN DARDCN:

them with care and caution, under the rare condi-
tions wherein they could at any time be afforded ;
and, if this should prove to be the fact, it is needless
to dilate on the intense interest of even such
semblance of confirmation of our hopes. I must
earnestly protest, however, at starting, that, in my
opinion, to regard anything which could be so no-
ticed as being vnore than such a confirmation, or, as
if it could constitute an argument for belief in a
future life, would be foolish in the extreme, seeing
the great obscurity and the evanescent nature of aU
such phenomena. Our faith in immortality must be
built on altogether different ground, if it is to be of
any value as a part of our religion or of our philos-
ophy. But, assuming that we are, individually,
already convinced that the quasi-universal creed of
the human race is not erroneous, and that ^^ the soul
of a man never dies,"* we may not unreasonably

•There ie an argument which, I beliere, now inflnenoes more or less
conscionsly the minds of many intelligent persons against the belief in
the immortal life. It amounts to this : Granted that there is a God, and
that he is absolutely benerolently disposed toward mankind, it does not
follow (as commonly assumed) that He wUl bestow immortality on man,
because U U qtdte postUOe that there may be an inherent abeurdUy and
eontradiction in the idea of an immortal flnUe creature^— it may, in
short, be no more within the scope of divine power to create an immortal
man than to make a triangle with the properties of a circle. If we could
be first assured that the thing were poseWUt then arguments derived from
the justice and goodness of the Deity might be valuable, as affording us
ground for believing that Se will do that possible thing. But, while it

THE BIDDLE OF DEATH. 247

turn to the solemn scene of dissolution, and ask
whether there does not sometimes occur, under one
.or two perhaps of its hundred forms, some incidents
which point in the direction of the great fact
which we believe to be actually in process of realiza-
tion ? According to our common conviction, there is
a moment of time when the man whom we have
known in his garb of flesh casts it aside, actually, so
to speak, before our eyes, and " this mortal puts
on immortality." As in Blanco White's beautiful
sonnet, he is, like Adam, watching his first sunset,
and trembling to lose sight of the world, and the

remains an open question whether we are not talking actual nonsense
when we speak of an ever-liying created being, such reflections on the
moral attributes of God are beside the mark. No justice or goodness can
be inyolved in doing that which, in the nature of things, is impossible.

Now, of course, there is a little confusion here between a future life—
a mere post-mortem addition of so many years or centuries to this
mortal existence— and an inrvmortal 2(^6, which, it is assumed, will con-
tinue either in a series of births and deaths or in one unbroken life for-
ever and ever. In the former idea, no one can find any self-contradiction.
It is only the latter notion of immortality, strictly so described, which is
suspected of invoMng a contradiction. Practically, however, the two
ideas must stand or fall together; for almost every argument for the
survival of the soul after death bears with double force against its extinc-
tion at any subsequent epoch of its existence.

Taking then the future life of a man as, to all intents and purposes,
the immortal life, we are bound to confront the difficulty,— " What right
have we to assume that immortality and creaturehood are compatible the
one with the other? "

A priori argument on such a matter is altogether futile. We know
and can reason literally nothing about it. For anything we could urge

248 THB PEAK IN DABIEN :

question to be solved is whether darkness has en-
shrouded him, or whether

"Hesperus with the hosts of heaven caine^
Andy lo I Creation widened in his view" ;

and he may have asked himself^ —

"Who would have thought such darkness lay concealed
Within thy beams, O Sun ? or deemed,
While flower and leaf and insect stood revealed,
That to such countless orbs thou mad'st us blind ? "

and life, like light, had been only a deception and
a veil.

We have walked in company with our brother,
perchance for years, through the " wilderness of this
world," over its arid plains of toil and through its
sweet valleys of love and pleasure; and then we
have begun to climb the awful Andes which have

anleeedsta to the obgerwUion of a man* a custuaX state, it was, apparently,
jTust as probable that he could not be made immortstl as that he could
be made bo by any conceivable power in the uniyerse. But we are not
quite in the i>08ition of lacking all such a posteriori assistance to our
judgment. We can see how God has actually constituted the human race,
and the problem is consequently modified to this : " Are there any signs
or tokens that man is meant for something more than a mere mundane
existence?" It is obvious that, if immortality were an attribute which
in the nature of things he could never share, nothing in his mental or
moral constitution would have been made with any reference to such an
unattainable destiny. If, on the other hand, there be in his nature evi-
dences of a purpose extending beyond the scope of this life, and stretch-
ing out into the limitless perspective of eternity, thei) \^e are aut|iori«ed to

THE BIDDLE OF DEATH. 249

always loomed before us at our journey's end, —
their summits against the sky, — and beyond them
the undiscovered land. Onward, a little before
us, as chance may decide, our companion perhaps
mounts the last acclivity; and we see him slowly
approach the mountain's crown, while our lagging
steps yet linger on the slopes below. Sometimes,
ere he reach the hill-top, he is enveloped in cloud,
and then we see him no more ; but again, sometimes,
he remains in the full simlight, and though distant
from us, and beyond the reach of our voice, it is yet
possible for us to watch his attitude and motions.
Now, we see him nearing the summit. A few steps
more, and there must break on his vision whatever
there may be of the unknown world beyond, — a
howling wilderness or a great Pacific of joy. Does
he seem, as that view bursts on him, whatsoever it

draw the inference that the Anthor of his being planned for him a future
existence, and, of course, knew that he might enjoy that divine heritage.

Here, then, the argument lies in manageable shape before us. It is
true we only see a small i>ortion of humanity, as it has yet been drawn
out ; but just as mathematicians can determine, from any three given
points, the nature of the curve to which they belong, so we have enough
indications to guide us to a conclusion respecting the character of our
race. In every department of our nature, save our perishable bodies, we
find something which seems to point beyond our threescore years and
ten,— something inconsistent with the hypothesis that those years com-
plete our intended existence. Our busy intellects, persistently wrestling
with the mysteries of eternity ; our human affections craving for undying
lore ; oar sense of justice, bom of no past experience of a reign of Asirea,

250 THE PEAK IN DABIEN:

may be, — does he seem to be inspired with hope or
cast down with despair? Do his arms drop in con-
sternation, or does he lift them aloft with one glad
gesture of rapture, ere he descend the farther slope,
and is lost to our sight forever?

It appears to me that we may, though with much
diffidence, answer this question as regards some of
our comrades in life's journey, who have gone before
us, and of whom the last glimpse has been one full
of strange, mysterious, but most joyful promise.
Let us inquire into the matter calmly, making due
allowance both for natural exaggeration of mourn-
ing friends, who recall the most affecting scenes, and
also for the probable presence of cerebral disturb-
ance and hallucination at the moment of physical
dissolution.

Of course, it is quite possible that the natural law
of death may be that the departed always sink into

but resolutely propheeying, in tpite of experience, a perfect Judgment
hereafter ; the measareless meaning which moral distinctionB carry to
our consciences ; the unutterable longing of our spirits for union (not
wholly unattained eren here) with the living Ood, the Father of spirits,—
an these things seem to show that we are built, so to speak, on a larger
scale than that of our earthly life. The foundations are too deep and
wide, the cornerstones are by far too massive, if nothing but the Tal>ema-
de of a day be the design of the Architect. In brief, then, we may admit
freely that, for aught we know, " God could not give to a triangle the
properties of a circle," and yet, nevertheless, hold our faith undisturbed,
since we find that the line which His hand has actually drawn is a oubys
olrsmty^— a few degrees of the circumference of a stupendous circle.

THE BIDDLE OP DEATH. 251

a state of unconsciousness, and rather dip beneath
a Lethe than leap a Rubicon. It is likewise possi-
ble that the faculties of a disembodied soul, what-
ever that may be, may need time and use, like those
of an infant, before they can be practically employed.
But there is also at least a possibility that con-
sciousness is not always lost, but is continuous
through the passage from one life to another, and
that it expands rather than closes at the moment
when the bonds of the flesh are broken, and the man
enters into possession of his higher powers and
vaster faculties, symbolled by the beautiful old
emblem of Psyche's emancipated butterfly quitting
the shell of the chrysalis.* In this latter case there
is a certain prima facie presumption that close ob-
servation ought to permit us occasionally to obtain
some brief glimpse, some glance, though but of

"There is an insect, the Lunar Sphinx Moth, which exhibits, in its
first stage, not only the usual prevision for its security whUe in the help-
less chrysalis state, but a singular foresight of its own requirements
when it shall have become a winged moth. Having made, by eating its
way upwa/rd through the pith of a willow, an appropriate hiding-place, it
finds itself with its head in a position in which, were it to become a moth,
it could never push itself down, and escape at the aperture below. The
little creature accordingly, before it goes to sleep, laboriously turns round,
and places its head near the entrance, where, as a moth, it will make its
happy exit into the fields of air. There seems something curiously aJdn
in the unaccountable foresight of this insect, of a state of existence it has
never experienced, and the vague and dim sentiment of tomiortality,
common to mankind since the days of the cave-dwellers of the Stone Age.

252 THE PBAK IN D ABDfiN :

lightning swiftness and evanescence, reyealing par-
tially this transcendent change.

In a majority of deaths, the accompanying physical
conditions hide from the spectators whatever psycho-
logical phenomena may be taking place. The sun
of our poor human life mostly sets behind an impen-
etrable cloud. Of all forms of death, the conunonest
appears to be the awful " agony " with its uncon-
scious groans and stertorous breath. The dying
person seems to sink lower and lower, as if beneath
the waters of an imfathomable sea ; a word, a motion,
a glance, rising up at longer and longer intervals, till
the last slow and distant sighs terminate the woful
strife, and the victory of Death is complete. When
this is the mode of dissolution, it is of course hope-
less to look for any indication of the fate of the soul
at its exodus ; and the same holds good as regards
death in extreme old age, or after exhausting dis-
ease, when the sufferer very literally " falls asleep."
Again, there are deaths which are accompanied by
great pain or delirium, or which are caused by
sudden accidents, altogether hiding from our obser-
vation the mental condition of the patient. Only in
a small residue of cases, the bodily conditions are
such as to cause neither interference with nor yet
concealment of the process of calm and peaceful dis-
solution in the full light of mental sanity ; and it is

THE BIDDLB OP DEATH. 258

to these only we can look with any hope of fruitful
observation. I ask whether in such cases instances
have ever been known of occurrences having any
significance taken in connection with the solemn
event wherewith they are associated. Does our
forerunner on the hill-top show by his looks and
actions, since he is too far off to speak to us, that he
beholds from his "Peak in Darien" an Ocean yet
hidden from our view?

I should hesitate altogether to affirm positively
that such is the case ; but, after many inquiries on
the subject, I am still more disinclined to assert the
contrary. The truth seems to be that, in almost
every family or circle, a question will elicit recollec-
tions of death-bed scenes, wherein, with singular
recurrence, appears one very significant incident, —
namely, that the dying person, precisely at the
moment of death, and when the power of speech
was lost, or nearly lost, seemed to see something ; or
rather, to speak more exactly, to become conscious
of something present (for actual sight is out of
question) of a very striking kind, which remained
invisible to and unperceived by the assistants.
Again and again, this incident is repeated. It is
described almost in the same words by persons who
have never heard of similar occurrences, and who
suppose their own experience to be unique, and have

254 THB PEAK IN DABSSN:

raised no theory upon it, but merely consider it to
be "strange/' "curious," "aflfecting," and nothing
more. It is invariably explained that the dying
person is lying quietly, when suddenly, in the very
act of expiring, he looks up, — sometimes starts up
in bed, — and gazes on (what appears to be) vacancy
with an expression of astonishment, sometimes
developing instantly into joy, and sometimes cut
short in the first emotion of solemn wonder and
awe. If the dying man were to see some utterly
unexpected but instantly recognized vision, causing
him a great surprise or rapturous joy, his face could
not better reveal the fact. The very instant this
phenomenon occurs, death is actually taking place,
and the eyes glaze even while they gaze at the
unknown sight. If a breath or two still heave the
chest, it is obvious that the soul has already departed.

A few narrations of such observations, chosen
from a great number which have been communicated
to the writer, will serve to show more exactly the
point which it is desired should be established by
a larger concurrence of testimony. The following
are given in the words of a friend on whose accuracy
every reliance may be placed : —

"I have heard numberless instances of dying
persons showing unmistakably by their gestures,
and sometimes by their words, that they saw in the

THE BIDDLE OP DEATH. 255

moment of dissolution what could not be seen by
those around them. On three occasions, facts of this
nature came distinctly within my own knowledge;
and I will therefore limit myself to a detail of that
which I can give on my own authority, although the
circumstances were not so striking as many others
known to me, which I believe to be equally true.

"I was watching one night beside a poor man
dying of consumption. His case was hopeless, but
there was no appearance of the end being very near.
He was in full possession of his senses, able to talk
with a strong voice, and not in the least drowsy.
He had slept through the day, and was so wakeful
that I had been conversing with him on ordinary
subjects to while away the long hours. Suddenly,
while we were thus talking quietly together, he
became silent, and fixed his eyes on one particular
spot in the room, which was entirely vacant, even
of furniture. At the same time, a look of the greatest
delight changed the whole expression of his face,
and, after a moment of what seemed to be intense
scrutiny of some object invisible to me, he said to
me in a joyous tone, 'There is Jim.' Jim was a
little son whom he had lost the year before, and
whom I had known well; but the dying man had
a son still living, named John, for whom we had
sent, and I concluded it was of John he was speak-

256 THE PEAK m DABIEK:

ing, and that he thought he heard him arriving. So
I answered, —

" ' No. John has not been able to come.'

^^The man turned to me impatiently, and said:
*' I do not mean John, I know he is not here : it is
Jim, my little lame Jim. Surely, you remember
him?'

" ' Yes,' I said, ' I remember dear little Jim who
died last year quite well.'

"'Don't you see him, then? There he is,' said
the man, pointing to the vacant space on which his
eyes were fixed; and, when I did not answer, he
repeated almost fretfully, ' Don't you see him stand-
ing there?'

"I answered that I could not see him, though I
felt perfectly convinced that something was. visible
to the sick man, which I could not perceive. When
I gave him this answer, he seemed quite amazed, and
turned round to look at me with a glance almost of
indignation. As his eyes met mine, I saw that a
film seemed to pass over them, the light of intelli-
gence died away, he gave a gentle sigh and expired.
He did not live five minutes from the time he first
said, ' There is Jim,' although there had been no sign
of approaching death previous to that moment.

" The second case was that of a boy about fourteen
years of age, dying also of decline. He was a re-

THE EIDDLB OF DEATH. 257

fined, highly educated child, who throughout his
long illness had looked forward with much hope and
longing to the unknown life to which he believed
he was hastening. On a bright summer morning, it
became evident that he had reached his last hour.
He lost the power of speech, chiefly from weakness ;
but he was perfectly sensible, and made his wishes
known to us by his intelligent looks. He was sit-
ting propped up in bed, and had been looking rather
sadly at the bright sunshine playing on the trees
outside his open window for some time. He had
turned away from this scene, however, and was
facing the end of the room, where there was nothing
whatever but a closed door, when all in a moment
the whole expression of his face changed to one of
the most wondering rapture, which made his half-
closed eyes open to their utmost extent, while his
lips parted with a smile of perfect ecstasy. It was
impossible to doubt that some glorious sight was
visible to him; and, from the movement of his eyes, it
was plain that it was not one, but many objects on
which he gazed, for his look passed slowly from end
to end of what seemed to be the vacant wall before
him, going back and forward with ever-increasing
delight manifested in his whole aspect. His mother
then asked him, if what he saw was some wonderful
sight beyond the confines of this world, to give her ^

258 THE PEAK IK DABIEK:

token that it was so by pressing her hand. He at
once took her hand, and pressed it meaningly, giving
thereby an intelligent affirmative to her question,
though unable to speak. As he did so, a change
passed over his face, his eyes closed, and in a few
minutes he was gone.

"The third case, which was that of my own
brother, was very similar to this last. He was an
elderly man, dying of a painful disease, but one
which never for a moment obscured his faculties.
Although it was known to be incurable, he had been
told that he might live some months, when some-
what suddenly the summons came on a dark Janu-
ary morning. It had been seen in the course of the
night that he was sinking ; but for some time he had
been perfectly silent and motionless, apparently in a
state of stupor, his eyes closed and his breathing
scarcely perceptible. As the tardy dawn of the
winter morning revealed the rigid features of the
countenance from which life and intelligence seemed
to have quite departed, those who watched him felt
uncertain whether he still lived ; but suddenly, while
they bent over him to ascertain the truth, he opened
his eyes wide, and gazed eagerly upward with such
an unmistakable expression of wonder and joy that
a thrill of awe passed through all who witnessed it.
His whole face grew bright with a strange gladness,

THE BIDDLE OF DEATH. 259

while the eloquent eyes seemed literally to shine, as
if reflecting some light on which they gazed. He
remained in this attitude of delighted surprise for
some minutes, then in a moment the eyelids fell, the
head drooped forward, and with one long breath the
spirit departed."

A different kind of case from those above narrated
by my friend was that of a young girl known to me,
who had passed through the miserable experiences
of a sinful life at Aldershot, and then had tried to
drown herself in the river Avon, near Clifton. She
was in some way saved from suicide, and placed for
a time in a penitentiary ; but her health was found
to be hopelessly ruined, and she was sent to die in
the quaint old workhouse of St. Peter's at Bristol.
For many months, she lay in the infirmary, literally
perishing piecemeal of disease, but exhibiting pa-
tience and sweetness of disposition quite wonderful
to witness. She was only eighteen, poor young
creature, when all her little round of error and pain
had been run ; and her innocent, pretty face might
have been that of a child. She never used any sort
of cant (so common among women who have been
in Refuges), but had apparently somehow got hold
of a very living and real religion, which gave her
comfort and courage, and inspired her with the

260 THE PEAK m DABIEK:

beautiful spirit "with which she bore her frightful
sufferings. On the wall opposite her bed, I had
hung by chance a print of the " Lost Sheep " ; and
Mary S., looking at it one day, said to me, "That
is just what I was and what happened to me ; but I
am being brought safe home now." For a long time
before her death, her weakness was such that she
was quite incapable of lifting herself up in bed,
or of supporting herself when lifted; and she, of
course, continued to lie with her head on the
pillow, while life gradually and painfully ebbed
away, and she seemingly became nearly uncon-
scious. In this state she had been left one Satur-
day night by the nurse in attendance. Early at
dawn next morning, — an Easter morning, as it
chanced, — the poor old women who occupied the
other beds in the ward were startled from their
sleep by seeing Mary S. suddenly spring up to a
sitting posture in her bed, with her arms out-
stretched and her face raised, as if in a perfect
rapture of joy and welcome. The next instant,
the body of the poor girl fell back a corpse. Her
death had taken place in that moment of mysteri-
ous ecstasy.

A totally different case again was told me by the
daughter of a man of high intellectual distinction,
well knowft in the world of letters. When dying

TBE BIDDLB 07 DEAl^. 261

peacefully, as became the close * of a profoundly
religious life, he was observed by his daughter
suddenly to look up as if at some spectacle invisi-
ble to those around, with an expression of solemn
surprise and awe, very characteristic, it is said, of
his habitual frame of mind. At that instant, and
before the look had time to falter or change, the
shadow of death passed over his face, and the end
had come.

In yet another case, I am told that at the last
moment so bright a light seemed suddenly to shine
from the face of a dying man that the clergyman
and another friend who were attending him actually
turned simultaneously to the window to seek for the
cause.

Another incident of a very striking character was
described as having occurred in a family united very
closely by affection. A dying lady, exhibiting the
aspect of joyful surprise to which we have so often
referred, spoke of seeing, one after another, three of
her brothers who had long been dead, and then,
apparently, recognized last of all a fourth brother,
who was believed by the bystanders to be still living
in India. The coupling of his name with that of
his dead brothers excited such awe and horror in
the mind of one of the persons present that she
rushed from the room. In due course of time.

262 THE PSAK IK DABIBN :

letters were received announcing the death of the
brother in India, which had occurred some tune
before his dying sister seemed to recognize him.

Again, in another case, a gentleman who had lost
his only son some years previously, and who had
never recovered from the afBicting event, exclaimed
suddenly when dying, with the air of a man
making a most rapturous discovery, *^I see him I
I see him!"

Not to multiply such anecdotes too far, — anec-
dotes which certainly possess a uniformity pointing
to some similar cause, whether that cause be physi-
ological or psychical, — I will now conclude with
one authenticated by a near relative of the persons
concerned. A late colonial bishop was commonly
called by his sisters ^^ Charlie," and his eldest sister
bore the pet name of " Liz." They had both been
dead for some years, when their younger sister,
Mrs. W., also died, but before her death ap-
peared to behold them both. While lying still and
apparently unconscious, she suddenly opened her
eyes and looked earnestly across the room, as if she
saw some one entering. Presently, as if overjoyed,
she exclaimed, " O Charlie ! " and then, after a
moment's pause, with a new start of delight, as if he
had been joined by some one else, she went on, ^^ And
Liz!" and then added, "How beautiful you are I'*

THE EIDDLB OF DEATH. 263

After seeming to gaze at the two beloved forms for
a few minutes, she fell back on her pillow and died.

An instance — in many respects especially note-
worthy — of a similar impression of the presence of
the dead conveyed through another sense besides
sight is recorded in Caroline Fox's charming Jour-
nals^ Vol. II., p. 247. She notes under date Sep-
tember 5, 1856, as follows : —

" M. A. Schimmelpenninck is gone. She said just
before her death, ' Oh, I hear such beautiful voices,
and the children's are the loudest. ' "

Can any old Italian picture of the ascending
Madonna, with the cloud of cherub heads forming a
glory of welcome around her as she enters the higher
world, be more significant than this actual fact — so
simply told — of a saintly woman in dying hearing
" beautiful voices^ and the children's the loudest " ?
Of course, like all the rest, it may have been only
a physiological phenomenon, a purely subjective
impression; but it is at least remarkable that a
second sense should thus be under the same glamour,
and that again we have to confront, in the case of
hearing as of sights the anomaly of the (real or sup-
posed) presence of the beautiful and the delightful,
instead of the terrible and the frightful, while Nature
is in the pangs of dissolution. Does the brain,
then, unlike every known instrument, give forth its
sweetest music as its chords are breaking?

264 THE PEAK IK DABDfiK :

Instances like those recorded in this paper might,
I believe, be almost indefinitely multiplied, were
attention directed to them, and the experience of
survivors more generally communicated and re-
corded. Reviewing them, the question seems to
press upon us, Why should we not thus catch a
glimpse of the spiritual world through that half-
open portal wherein our dying brother is passing?
If the soul of man exist at all after the extinction
of the life of the body, what is more probable than
that it should begin at the very instant when the
veil of the flesh is dropping off to exercise those
spiritual powers of perception which we must sup-
pose it to possess (else were its whole after-life a
blank), and to become conscious of other things
than those of which our dim senses can take cogni-
zance? If it be not destined to an eternity of
solitude (an absurd hypothesis), its future compan-
ions may well be recognized at once, even as it goes
forth to meet them. It seems indeed almost a thing
to be expected that some of them should be ready
waiting to welcome it on the threshold. Is there
not, then, a little margin for hope, if not for any
confident belief, that our fondest anticipations will
be verified ; nay, that the actual experience of many
has already verified them? May it not be that,
when that hour comes for each of us which we have

THE RIDDLE OF DEATH. 266

been wont to dread as one of parting and sorrow, —

** The last long farewell on the shore
Of this rude world,"

ere we "put off into the unknown dark," — we may
find that we only leave for a little time the friends
of earth to go straight to the embrace of those who
have long been waiting for us to make perfect for
them the nobler life beyond the grave ? May it not
be that our very first dawning sense of that enfran-
chised existence will be the rapture of reunion with
the beloved ones whom we have mourned as lost, but
who have been standing near, waiting longingly for
our recognition, as a mother may watch beside the
bed of a fever-stricken child, till reason reillumines
its eyes,and with outstretched arms it cries "Mother."
There are doubtless some to whom it would be
very dreadful to think of thus meeting on the thresh-
old of eternity the wronged, the deceived, the for-
saken. But for most of us, God be thanked, no
dream of celestial glory has half the ecstasy of the
thought that in dying we may meet — and meet at
onee^ before we have had a moment to feel the awful
loneliness of death — the parent, wife, husband,
child, friend of our life, soul of our soul, whom we
consigned long ago with breaking hearts to the
grave. Their "beautiful" forms (as that dying

266 THE PEAK IN DABIEN.

lady beheld her brother and sister) entering our
chamber, standing beside our bed of death, and
come to rejoin ns for ever, — what words can describe
the happiness of such a vision ? It may be awaiting
us all. There is even, perhaps, a certain probability
that it is actually the natural destiny of the human
soul, and that the affections which alone of earthly
things can survive dissolution will, like magnets,
draw the beloved and loving spirits of the dead
around the dying. I can see no reason why we
should not indulge so ineffably blessed a hope. But,
even if it be a dream, the faith remains, built on no
such evanescent and shadowy foundation, that there
is One Friend, — and He the best, — in whose arms
we shall surely fall asleep, and to whose love we
may trust for the reunion, sooner or later, of the
severed links of sacred human affection.

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A COURSE OF LECTURES
By FRANCES POSATER COBBE.

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A YEAR OF MIRACLE.

A Poem in Poor Sermons.
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Cobbe, Frances Power
The peak in Darien.

AC
8

.C565
1882

'^^

tr-^-